JONAH GOLDBERG'S IDEA OF A REPUTABLE SCHOLAR

As you may already know from Sadly, No! or the Carpetbagger Report, Jonah Goldberg, in his new book Liberal Fascism, claims that homosexuality and Nazism were inextricably linked in Hitler's Germany (despite the well-documented persecution of gays by the Nazis). As a source for this assertion, Goldberg cites The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

The Sadly, No! post gives some background on Lively and the book, but there's a lot to be found, and I've barely scratched the surface.

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls Lively "the chief international envoy" for a Latvia-based anti-gay group called Watchmen on the Walls, which appears to be linked to the gay-bashing death of Satender Singh in Sacramento in July.

According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh's friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh's party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.

The pregnant woman said she didn't want to fight them.

"We don't want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."

One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh's friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.

More from SPLC:

The Watchmen movement's strategy for combating the "disease" of homosexuality calls for aggressive confrontation. "We church leaders need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it comes to social and political issues," Lively argues in a widely-circulated tract called Masculine Christianity. "For every motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy Center or ex-gay support group we need a battle-hardened, take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like [the anti-abortion group] Operation Rescue."

...When he personally confronts the enemy, Lively practices what he preaches when it comes to "battle-hardened" tactics. He recently was ordered by a civil court judge to pay $20,000 to lesbian photojournalist Catherine Stauffer for dragging her by the hair through the halls of a Portland church in 1991.

Lively occasionally writes for Chalcedon Report, a journal published by the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading Christian Reconstructionist organization in the country. (Reconstructionists typically call for the imposition of Old Testament law, including such draconian punishments as stoning to death active homosexuals and children who curse their parents, on the United States.) But he's most famous as the co-author of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party....

The Pink Swastika ... has been roundly discredited by legitimate historians.... Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, said the book was "produced by a right-wing Christian cult and is as correct as flat earth theory." ...

More here, from a February issue of Washington's Oregon's Willamette Week:

In front of about 30 people gathered recently in a Salem church sanctuary to celebrate the reunion of the Oregon Citizens Alliance, Scott Lively found cause for optimism about the rebirth of the anti-gay group....

Lively, a longtime OCA leader, introduced five members from the group the Watchmen on the Walls -- an international network of Christian activists dedicated to fighting what it calls "the homosexual agenda" -- to show a video of their movement in parts of the former Soviet Union.

The 45-minute video, which repeatedly refers to homosexuals as "terrorists," shows how conservative Latvians successfully stopped gays from marching in their capital, Riga. (European news reports show anti-gay demonstrators throwing feces on the gays.)

The video also features Alexei Ledyaev -- a Kazakhstan-born Baptist pastor and leader of the New Generation Church, whose satellite broadcasts claim an audience of more than 200 million people -- leading large crowds in chants of "In the name of Jesus Christ, we curse the name of homosexuality!"...

[Lively] believes the 100,000 Russian-speaking refugees and immigrants from the former Soviet Union now living in Oregon will make fertile recruiting ground for the OCA's new foot soldiers.

As evidence of what could happen here, Lively showed a music video of a Watchmen on the Walls concert, which was a high-budget anti-gay rock opera filmed live in Riga. It features a tuxedo-clad man standing on top of a castle wall that's surrounded by men in tight black clothes holding tiki torches. There are flashing lights, smoke and howling guitar riffs as they march and sing militaristically about "victory over the gays."

..."Perhaps by November 2008," Lively said, "we will have enough support to fill a Watchmen on the Walls concert in Oregon."

In addition to The Pink Swastika, Lively has written a book called The Poisoned Stream: Gay Influence in Human History. He talks about it here:

...I have come to discover, through various leads, a dark and powerful homosexual presence in other historical periods: the Spanish Inquisition, the French "Reign of Terror," the era of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American slavery. My thoughts have increasingly turned toward writing a larger, more comprehensive analysis of homosexuality in history. I have come to believe, with Samuel Igra, that homosexuality has truly been a "poisoned stream" in human history.

... The Poisoned Stream is a starting point for the larger work which I envision. The Igra material broadens the scope of our study to the events surrounding World War I and addresses the influence of homosexuals on these events. Additional volumes, addressing other periods of history on which homosexuals had a significant sociopolitical influence, will follow this one....

Everything bad that's ever happened in human history is gay people's fault!

Well, he probably does think that. Note what he says at the beginning of this video of an appearance in Latvia:

I have studied the homosexual movement for eighteen years. It is the most dangerous political movement in the world.

And this despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that homosexuality doesn't really exist:

"In reality, homosexuality is nothing more than same-gender conduct among people who are innately and unchangeably heterosexual."

There's your expert, Jonah. I hope you're proud of yourself.