Scott Lively began his April 15 WorldNetDaily column by complaining that Mike Pence “caved to pressure from the LGBTs and killed strong and needed legislation designed to protect Christian businesses from attack by homosexual activists who use state and local anti-discrimination laws as an offensive weapon rather than the defensive shield they were sold to the public as.” He ultimately complained that Pence had been hired as a “distinguished visiting fellow” by Grove City College, a Christian school. In between, Lively went on a rant about an instructor at the college:
So what was Pence’s reward for giving so much to the globalist cause? A plum posting to a lucrative A-list NGO, foundation, corporate board or Ivy League university? LOL. No! He was shunted off to puny, pedestrian Grove City College, most famous in pro-family circles as the Christian college that employed fellow “gay pandering” turncoat Warren Throckmorton as a psychology professor.
Some of my longer-term readers may recall that Throckmorton was the snake-in-the-grass who single-handedly launched the decade-long campaign of personal destruction against me that culminated in the federal lawsuit accusing me of “crimes against humanity” for teaching the biblical view of homosexuality in Uganda. I did so at a Kampala seminar in early March of 2009, and also gave comments to Ugandan members of parliament in their National Assembly Hall, urging them to focus not on punishment but on prevention and rehabilitation in their planned but as of then unwritten legislation opposing the normalization of homosexuality. I cited my own personal experience of choosing rehab instead of going to jail for a drunk-driving conviction. (Legally speaking, I consider alcoholism and homosexuality to be roughly equivalent behavioral disorders.)
Immediately following my comments, while I was still in Kampala, Throckmorton launched a surprise attack against me, falsely claiming I was pushing for forced therapy for homosexuals. I was utterly shocked, because even though I had not met him personally, I considered him to be a pro-family peer. He had put out an exceptional video for the ex-“gay” movement titled “I Do Exist” and was well respected in pro-family circles. But apparently, the LGBTs found some dirt on him or otherwise managed to flip him because his knife-stab in my back was only the first in a new mission to attack any Christians who threatened the LGBT cause. I was further shocked when, upon confronting him by phone, he defended his actions and doubled-down on them. He created an entire section on his website devoted to attacks upon me.
I was only one of several, including the eminent Christian historian David Barton, who had recently stoked Throckmorton’s ire by venturing onto the pro-family battlefield with some strong pro-family comments. Upon reading an article about Barton’s publisher suddenly canceling the publication of his book “Jefferson Lies” (refuting lies about Jefferson), I noticed an awfully familiar pattern in the discussion about how the cancellation came about. I called Barton and pieced together that, yes indeed, Throckmorton had orchestrated the attack. I then wrote two articles in Barton’s defense.
Note that Lively doesn’t actually deny that he was in favor of “forced therapy for homosexuals,” and it’s laughable that he’s portraying himself as a voice of reason in Uganda because he opposed “punishment” for not being heterosexual — if he was really moderate, he would have opposed the law altogether. He provided no evidence that “the LGBTs found some dirt on” Throckmorton that made him “flip”; he fails to consider the possibility that, unlike Lively, Throckmorton has decided to honor the basic humanity of LGBT people and should not be thrown into the criminal justice system simply for being who they are.
It’s also interesting that Lively immediately took Barton’s side in the controversy about his book with no serious attempt at examining the claims Throckmorton made that debunk the book. In one of the articles he wrote in defense of Barton, Lively insisted that because he “uses a polemical style,” it’s “highly unfair to gather a panel of academics to sit in judgment on his book because first, it is only one side of a two-sided argument that should be taken together, and second, academics are trained against using a polemical style in the approach to history and are thus (as a class, though there are exceptions) professionally biased against it.” (It’s also worth noting that WND republished Barton’s book after some light editing.)
Lively concluded with one final rant at the school:
If, as they say, “personnel is policy,” GCC has just made itself a Never Trumper sinking ship, on top of having been a sanctuary for a Bible-defying pro-LGBT saboteur. If I were a parent of college-bound teens, I’d cross this twice-failed “college of Christian compromise” off my list and keep them as far away from the traitor Mike Pence as possible.
Yes, Lively thinks that not hating LGBT people as much as he does and exposing false claims made in a so-called history book makes one a “saboteur.”