A Sunday meditation on how mainstream Anglicans live in Lively times ...

(“Infectious Germs.” From the Nazi propaganda organ Der Stürmer, April 15, 1943, p. 1. Triangles, representing homosexuals, hammer-and-sickle signs (communists), and even a dollar sign are strewn among the Stars of David. The poem: 
 With his poison, the Jew 
Drags Weaker peoples,
Burdened blood, 
So a disease-picture appears 
That speeds them downward. 
But our report resounds: 
The blood is clean. We’re healthy! - here)


A correspondent kindly introduced the pond to Scott Lively, the barking mad, fiercely homophobic writer of The Pink Swastika:

As they've lost battle after battle in the U.S., conservative activists have found responsive audiences abroad, eager partners, and a way to remake themselves. For some like Lively, whose views would be completely unacceptable in the United States—in his book, The Pink Swastika, he explains the Holocaust by alleging that most senior Nazis were gay—it's thrilling. "It was really bizarre," Lively says, reminiscing about the glowing reception he received on his first tour of Russia almost a decade ago.

Lively has been active in spreading homophobia in Africa and Russia, and there's more, way more, perhaps too much, here about him, and his perverted work ...

But wait, that Lively name rang a bell:

If you want an example of hate speech, why not have a read of Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, and her portrait of evangelicals in How Bryan Fischer is Making Mitt Romney More Conservative (sorry, inside the paywall):

In Idaho, Fischer attacked homosexuality with growing fervour. In 2007, he sponsored a summit where he hosted Scott Lively, the co-author of a widely criticized book, "The Pink Swastika," which argues that homosexuality was at the heart of Nazism. (In fact, the Nazi regime persecuted gays.) More recently, Lively has expressed support for anti-gay initiatives in Uganda. He has been a guest on Fischer's radio show, and Fischer often promotes Lively's theories. "Hitler himself was an active homosexual," Fisher has said. "Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Storm Troopers... Hitler discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough." On another occasion, Fischer declared that "homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews." (an old pond item from 2012, here)

Back then the pond asked the question:

...truth to tell is there any difference between a Jensenist blathering on about the human race, and the sort of nonsense spouted by fundies in the United States, given that the aim of the arguments is a shared desire to persecute gays? 

The answer is "actually not much", since all we're talking about is the degree of extremism, and since the angry Sydney Anglicans have notoriously sided with the forces of Christian darkness in Africa, where the persecution of gays has risen to a shocking level.

Oh come on, you say, that's just using the tar brush to give the old Anglican bollocks a good tarring.

But you don't have to look far for connections.

The angry Sydney Anglicans have always thought of the British Anglicans as being soft on gays, yet what can you find on Anglican Mainstream, Strengthening the Faith, an information resource for orthodox Anglicans?

Why you can find, without any form of rebuttal, refutation, denial or commentary, Berlin Monument Upholds Homosexuals as Nazi Victims - research suggests Nazi Party steeped in homosexuality, posted in May 2008.

And what does this tosh say?

Well in part, since we can only publish so much vile, false, abuse without a sense of nausea setting in:

In her 2006 study “The Pink Swastika as Holocaust Revisionist History,” renowned expert on sexuality Judith A. Reisman of the Institute for Media Education revealed that the 1995 “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party” by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams demonstrates that many key actively homosexual Nazi officials protected many homosexual individuals from harm. 
“Lively and Abrams… document the homosexual movement as the agents that ensconced National Socialism (the Nazi party) and Adolf Hitler, thus triggering a holocaust which engulfed all of Europe,” wrote Resiman. 
While Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” degraded Jews, Marxists, Negroes, Chinese, Arabs, women, and Eastern Europeans, the Fuhrer had no negative remarks for homosexuality. 
Instead, Hitler chose actively homosexual men as influential youth leaders. 
An actively homosexual teacher, Karl Fischer, founded the “Wandervogel” boys’ group that became the Hitler Youth in 1933 under renowned pederast, Hans Blueher. Similarly, convicted Nazi pederast Edmund Heines was given leadership over Schill Youth. 
“Other homosexual and bisexual leaders cited by these and other authors included Bladur von Schirach, Hitler Youth Leader; Hans Frank, Hitler’s Minister of Justice; Wilhelm Bruckner, Hitler’s adjutant; Walther Funk, Hitler’s Minister of Economics; friend and advisor Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second in command (who dressed “in drag and wore camp make-up”),” added Reisman. 

Uh huh. Of course on this basis, the Catholic church is run by paedophile Nazis and is full of pederast Nazis.

As for Lively?

“The Pink Swastika” convincingly undermined comparisons between the persecution of Jews and of homosexuals, contended Resiman. 
“Lively and Abrams report that basic mathematics refute the idea that homosexuals were killed for being homosexual. If homosexuals were treated like Jews, 2-3 million out of 2-3 million German homosexuals should have lost their businesses, their jobs, their property, their possessions and most should have lost their lives.”

And so on. It would be risible if it weren't obscene.

But let's move to modern times:

 Resiman also noted that the work of Lively and Abrams contains important lessons about the Nazi-like tactics of the contemporary “gay” agenda. 
“The Pink Swastika finds that serious ‘Judeo-Christians’ are the likely targets of this resurgent homosexual movement. In 1934, all German school children were receiving textual, verbal and cinematic classroom indoctrination into Fascism.” 
“The libraries purged anti Nazi books and teachers, just as our libraries are purging anti-homosexuality books and teachers. And, like our current status, by 1936, sexuality advocate, Wilheim Reich warned that the wide availability and juvenile use of pornography was creating heterophobic German children–boys and girls who feared and distrusted the opposite sex.” 
“The Pink Swastika should be studied in all our schools, primary to university,” concluded Resiman. “Historical research on Nazi homosexual power should be pouring out from our institutions of higher learning. That universities are captured by “politically correct” homosexual/feminism only proves how dangerous fraud in science has been and continues to be for our nation.”

So this is what orthodox Anglicans, part of the Anglican mainstream, read by way of an information resource to strengthen their faith?

Vile, rabidly wrong, ill-informed tosh, dressed up as history, but in reality gay bashing of the most sordid and offensive kind?

It is of course yet another classic example of blaming the victims for their persecution. It isn't about history, it's about flinging together gays, Nazis and paedophilia, in the certain knowledge that out of that Godwin's Law smearing a certain amount of mud will stick.

There are any number of healthy correctives, but that would require reading a little history - even if it means starting with the wiki, Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, which attempts a little factual evidence.

Of course there were homosexuals in the Nazi party, such as Röhm, but purging him was one of the reasons the Nazis began to take a much firmer attitude:

Himmler had initially been a supporter of Röhm, arguing that the charges of homosexuality against him were manufactured by Jews. But after the purge, Hitler elevated Himmler's status and he became very active in the suppression of homosexuality. He exclaimed, "We must exterminate these people root and branch... the homosexual must be eliminated."  
Shortly after the purge in 1934, a special division of the Gestapo was instituted to compile lists of gay individuals. In 1936, Himmler created the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion". 
Nazi Germany thought of German gay men as part of the "master race" and sought to force them into sexual and social conformity. Gay men who would not change or feign a change in their sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps under the "Extermination Through Work" campaign.

And so on.

What's startling is that the sort of vicious homophobia being spread by Lively can turn up on a purportedly orthodox mainstream British Anglican site without correction or reprimand, and now linger, like a stench, on the full to overflowing intertubes.

What to do, what to do?

Well the angry Sydney Anglicans could lead the way, by denouncing Lively and by denouncing "mainstream orthodox" British Anglicans for recycling his bigotry, and by renouncing their own support of the homophobic elements at work in assorted African churches ...

Don't hold your breath.

(Below: struck dead, hushed up)