Anti-Gay Pastor Scott Lively: Putin is 'Defender of Human Rights'

America can always count on a loud-mouthed religious leader to lay blame for the world's problems on the gays. So it was no surprise when anti-gay pastor Scott Lively stepped up to say that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a "defender of true human rights" for his recent decisions to target the LGBT community and to invade Ukraine.

According to Right Wing Watch, Lively said that LGBT equality was destroying the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law by creating "special rights for favored groups," and putting the country in "a death spiral of moral and ethical degeneracy."

Lively told World Net Daily that although "Russia remains an autocratic state with many lingering and greatly disturbing Soviet-era tendencies," they were "on the ascendancy in the matter of human rights," because America had turned its back on God while Russia had "begun embracing Christian values."

The anti-gay pastor then said that heathen America's leniency toward LGBT rights, including marriage equality, was the main reason behind the conflict between the U.S. and Russia. He also attributed it as the reason behind the conflict in the Ukraine, "at least on the part of the Obama State Department and the homosexualist leaders of the E.U."

Lively explained that he was "uniquely positioned" to comment on the situation, as a graduate of Trinity Law School who had traveled extensively in the former Soviet Union, meeting with high-level representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russia's pro-family movement.

"I ask you, which is the greater threat to human rights: Russia's law preventing homosexual activists from disseminating their propaganda to children, or the lawless decrees of these American federal judges? I submit that the former is not a threat at all, but a reaffirmation of true human rights (in that case the right of parents to raise their children according to their own values), while the latter is an egregious affront to liberty and an undermining of respect for the rule of law, which endangers all human rights," Lively told WND.

As an odd badge of courage, Lively noted that he was the first American to be sued in the U.S. for "Crimes Against Humanity," for preaching against homosexuality in Uganda, a country that proposed to "Kill the Gays" in an early draft of their recently-adopted anti-gay legislation. Because inciting riotous crowds of Ugandans to murder a sexual minority is the first thing that springs to people's minds when they hear the words "human rights."

Last year, Lively made headlines when he told NBC News that he was party responsible for creating Russia's highly controversial "homosexual propaganda" law.

"Yes, I think I influenced the Russian law," he said.