Gospel of Hatred: Recipe for Fatal Trust and Regressive Revolutions

To understand how Uganda and indeed other African countries so easily fall prey to Western influence, one must first consider modern African history as defined by Europeans’ first contact with the inhabitants of the continent, forging bonds through trade, linguistic exchanges, and religious conversion.

All of these interactions would lay the foundation for the ultimate proliferation of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the partition of Africa and colonialism, the mass conversion of Africans to Christianity, adoption of Western governance and legislative frameworks, the plunder of resources from the African continent, bloody wars, conflicts, and genocides, and the current global hierarchy of hegemonic power with a majority of present-day African nations at the bottom of the totem pole – vassal states to the powerful West.

In a Guardian article published on November 12, 2017, author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities Chigozie Obioma writes: “Colonialism across most of Africa was so thorough – especially among the former British protectorates – that in its aftermath Africa was essentially hollowed out. The civilisations of the peoples, their various cultures and traditions, their religions, political philosophies and institutions, were eroded or even destroyed.” Obioma, also in the article, gives the example of Western banking and how it was perceived by the Igbo when introduced by the West as a foolish proposition, a mentality that changed in short order when, by the 19th century, Western-style banking was widely accepted in modern-day Nigeria – madness cum common practice.

A narrative of inherent African barbarism, ineptitude, and corruptibility concocted by the first Europeans to interact with Africans all those centuries ago took root in the African conscience and became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Time and again, Africans have and continue to believe that solutions to their problems, many of them directly or indirectly caused by the authors of this lie, lay with the West. It, therefore, stands to reason that even after the official end of direct rule by Western powers in Africa, Africans still turn to the West, propped up messianically in much of the African conscience, to provide guidance on matters of religion, society, education, and finance.

“Today most of the nations in Africa should not even be called African nations, but western African nations. The language, political ideology, socio-economic structures, education, and everything that makes up a nation, even down to popular culture, do not originate from within these countries. African nations have a total dependency on foreign political philosophies and ideas, and their shifts and movements,” Obioma reiterates.

The Shyster’s Playbook

Unsurprisingly, African countries open their doors to snake oil salesmen who masquerade as benevolent saviors, only too willing to subject themselves to the task of saving the African from himself. They are the umpteenth coming of the heaven-sent missionaries who once so “patiently and lovingly” made the African turn away from his savage heathenry to a European God, all the while healing the converts of their diseases and ushering them into the world of the civilized lettered masses.

Against such a backdrop, one can understand how figures like American Renee Bach, an alleged missionary masquerading as a medical expert in Uganda could have evaded detection for so long, inflicting unimaginable harm and suffering in Uganda, including the death of two Ugandan children.

CNN reported on July 4, 2019 that Bach and her non-profit organization Serving His Children (SHC) were named in a civil lawsuit filed in Uganda for the operation of an unlicensed medical facility. According to plaintiffs in the case, including Women’s Probono Initiative (WPI), Gimbo Zubeda, and Kakai Annet, the “actions by Bach and SHC led to the death of Zubeda and Annet’s babies.” The suit further stated that Bach and SHC “have unlawfully practiced medicine and offered medical services to unsuspecting vulnerable children.” Bach had previously been interviewed by two CNN sister affiliate TV stations in Virginia in 2017, at which point she claimed that her organization’s focus was malnutrition while providing “preventative care programs and also treatment services.”

To the claim that Bach had misrepresented herself as a doctor, further corroborated by Zubeida and Annet who were convinced of the fact, as were two former SHC employees, Bach’s attorney, David Gibbs III, termed the allegations as spurious and lacking in merit. Despite Bach having “no lack of sympathy for these mothers who have lost their children” according to a response to the lawsuit by Gibbs, the lawsuit further claimed that SHC “was closed by the Jinja District Health Services Office in the year 2015 and ordered to refer all children under its care to available government health facilities but still continues to admit children to its premises.”  

Bach and SHC’s actions, the lawsuit further alleged, caused the “deaths of hundreds of children,” according to a former employee who claimed to have delivered the bodies of children who died at the facilities back to their home villages, the CNN article read. The Guardian later reported on January 22, 2021, that in 2020, Bach settled the civil suit agreeing to pay Zubeda and Annet 35 million Uganda Shillings or 7,335 pounds each in damages.

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At least 105 children died at Bach’s SHC center over its years of operation and her actions were decried by Art Caplan, the founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone School. Caplan said: “It’s a reminder…when you’re present in poor countries and you put on a white coat and wear a stethoscope or sound like a doctor, people are so desperate that they trust you, and betraying that trust is one of the worst things anyone can do… I think she was trying to do good but that drive to handle very tough, miserable health circumstances led her down the absolute wrong path so it’s not an excuse.”

Bach’s case holds true to the formula also applied by Scott Lively all those years before her arrival and may have even paved the way for her induction into Ugandan society, offering unfettered access backed by implicit trust. Lively had laid the foundation for the all-knowing, well-meaning Western whistleblower who was all too eager to warn the poor ignorant African masses of his society’s depraved plans for Africa’s people. How were they to know? Is it not the place of the African not to know and for the benevolent Westerner to inform, painstakingly coming to the aid of the African time and again?

Recipe for Success?

Before Lively set his anti-Homosexuality evangelism sights on the small East African country, he co-authored a widely discredited Holocaust revisionist book with the same theme which claimed that the Nazi party was full of Gay men titled The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party (1995). Later in 2007, before he would headline the 2009 anti-gay conference in Uganda that cemented his claim to fame in the country, he co-founded Watchmen on the Walls, a virulently anti-Gay organization active in Eastern Europe. Through Watchmen on the Wall, Lively joined forces with Latvian megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, calling the Gay rights movement “the most dangerous political movement in the world” while speaking at Ledyaev’s church in the Latvian capital of Riga in 2007.

As with other prominent anti-homosexuality figures from the West, Lively attempted to draw corollaries between dark periods of history. In The Pink Swastika he claims: “There is no question that homosexuality figures prominently in the history of the Holocaust. … The first years of terrorism against the Jews were carried out by the homosexuals of the SA.” He also claimed that the Roman Empire’s “horrific final days” were as a result of its emperors being Homosexual. Also unsurprising, according to Lively was the alleged fact “that nearly all of the most prolific serial killers in US history were homosexual,” while also pinning “America’s cultural decline” on the “rise of ‘gay rights.’”

The anti-LGBT conference organized by Family Life Network leader Stephen Langa at the Triangle Hotel in the Ugandan capital of Kampala in early 2009 would mark a turning point in anti-homosexuality campaigns in the East African country. Titled “Exposing the Truth behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda,” the conference attracted other heavyweights in the anti-Homosexuality campaign world, including ex-gay therapy group Exodus International board member Don Schmierer. Along with thousands of regular Ugandans in attendance, the conference was also attended by law enforcement, religious leaders, and government officials.

At the conference, anti-Gay tropes were trotted out en masse, including allegations of children being turned Gay through molestation by Homosexuals and the imminent threat to marriage by promiscuity-driven Gay rights activism. In a blog post, Lively would compare his anti-Homosexuality campaign in Uganda to a “nuclear bomb” that had exploded against the “gay agenda.” Only a month after the conference, the Ugandan parliament included Lively’s talking points when considering legislation to include the death penalty and life imprisonment for LBGT people.

In the 2010 documentary Missionaries of Hate, in response to his thoughts on the proposed bill, which included the death penalty and had garnered widespread condemnation, Lively claimed that passing the bill into law as-is was the lesser of two evils. Even though he claimed he didn’t support the death penalty for Homosexuality, he claimed that not passing the bill into law allowed “the American and the European gay activists to continue to do to that country what they’ve done here (in the US).”

Virulent Hatred

In an interview with Global Ally, Frank Mugisha, executive director of nonprofit advocacy organization Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) outlined how the evangelical movement in Uganda’s reliance on “homosexuality experts” brought about the rise of Lively and the eventual escalation of a virulent state Homophobia in the country. “His message was very clear – Homosexuality is a Western agenda that is here to end the African values and calling upon Ugandans to be soldiers of God to fight Homosexuality,” Mugisha said in the interview. After Lively’s remarks, anti-homosexuality demonstrations began in earnest in Uganda, culminating in the introduction of the Anti-Homosexuality law.

Lively, whose ministry had taken root in Uganda, was not acting alone, but rather with the support of a network of radical evangelical organizations that support homophobic campaigns in the US and abroad. “We were fortunate that some of our partners here in the United States were willing to work with us and help us. So we approached the Center for Constitutional Rights and were like, ‘Can we bring a lawsuit against Scott Lively,’” Mugisha said, explaining the start of a five-year legal battle to hold Lively accountable for his detrimental actions in Uganda.

Mugisha added: “For us it was [about] holding accountable religious leaders because they can do anything they want and walk away… They have presented themselves as the saviors… We want to show the world that there are extreme Christians spreading hatred in other parts of the world.”

The lawsuit filed against the one-time 2012candidate for Massachusetts governor stipulated that Lively, in his multiple trips to Uganda between 2009 and 2012, likened Homosexuality to a disease, claims that had “initiated, instigated, and directed” the persecution of Gay people in Uganda, leading to imprisonment, injury, and death.

The lawsuit filed against Lively by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda under the Alien Tort Claims Act, filed on March 14, 2012, was dismissed in 2017. Despite Lively’s win, he through his lawyer appealed the decision after having taken issue with US District Court Judge Michael Ponsor’s characterizations of him.

In his ruling, Judge Ponsor described Lively’s views as “ludicrous,” “abhorrent,” “pathetic,” and as examples of “crackpot bigotry.” In the two-page appeal document filed by Lively’s lawyer, Lively asked that the dismissal of the suit be upheld, but that “certain extraneous but prejudicial language immaterial to the disposition of the case and which the district court has no jurisdiction to entertain or enter” be amended.

While facing this lawsuit, Lively further propelled his anti-gay rights campaign to much of Eastern Europe, warning Moldovans “that the anti-discrimination law is the seed that contains the entire tree of the homosexual agenda, its all of its poisonous fruit,” when he traveled to the country to oppose a human rights bill.

Lively also took credit for a bill outlawing “homosexual propaganda” signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013, claiming that he influenced the Russian lawmakers’ decision. Since the signing of the bill, rampant homophobia has taken hold of Russia. A 2014 documentary titled Hunted: The War Against Gays in Russia followed the lives of several Gay people in Russia as well as the activities of anti-Gay vigilantes, showing how they use entrapment, physical violence and torture, and humiliation against suspected Gay men.

On July 14, the Russian Lower House of Parliament adopted a bill to outlaw Trans healthcare, dissolve the marriages of Trans individuals, and place a ban on confirming one’s Trans identity in legal documents, while barring Trans individuals from adopting children or acting as guardians over minors. The bill was soon approved and passed into law by Russia’s Upper House of Parliament on July 19.

Most recently, Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that the “international LGBT movement” was an “extremist organization,” after a lawsuit brought by the country’s Justice Ministry accusing the LGBT MOVEMENT OF inciting social and religious discord. The classification of the LGBT movement as an extremist organization under Russian law leaves those who are found guilty of participating in or financing such an organization open to imprisonment of up to 12 years. The move also prompted police raids of Gay bars in the Russian capital of Moscow, AP News reported on December 2.

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