He is perhaps most noted for his involvement in the 2009 anti-LGBQ+ legislation in Uganda. He was previously the California state director of the American Family Association. In 2014 and 2018, Lively ran for Governor of Massachusetts—first as an Independent, and then as a Republican candidate. Lively ultimately lost the primary to the Republican incumbent.
Lively got his start in the anti-LGBTQ+ movement with the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance, a group of conservative Evangelicals that campaigned for Ballot Measure 9 (1992), which would have placed a prohibition on state promotion of homosexuality in the Oregon Constitution. As part of his involvement with OCA, Lively was found guilty of battery against a lesbian photographer.
In 1995, Lively rose to fame on the national level through his book The Pink Swastika, in which he and co-author Kevin Abrams claimed that homosexuality was responsible for Nazism and the Holocaust. This was followed by The Poisoned Stream (1997) which claims that homosexuality drove the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, slavery in the United STates, and South African Apartheid.
Through Abiding Truth Ministries (est. 1997), Lively has engaged in anti-LGBTQ+ activism worldwide, most famously in Uganda. Through Abiding Truth Ministries, Lively spoke at the ‘Seminar on Exposing the Truth Behind Homosexuality and the Homosexual Agenda’ in Kampala, Uganda. The conference had thousands of attendees ranging from police to politicians to pastors and advanced claims that homosexuality was a foreign import that would destroy African society and that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles. Lively had further meetings with politicians, with the entire Parliament invited to have breakfast with him to discuss ‘the Dangers of Homosexuality’. His conversations with legislators laid the groundwork for the 2009 Bill and his points were present in its preamble. Lively’s involvement was the subject of a lawsuit brought my LGBTQ+ organizations in Uganda under the Alien Torts Statute. Lively was represented by Liberty Counsel.
Lively has also been involved in anti-LGBQ+ activism in Eastern Europe. In 2007, Lively co-founded Latvian-based Watchmen on the Walls with pastor Ken Hutcherson, Vlad Kusakin, and Alexey Ledyaev. Watchmen on the Walls operates locally as a ministry and internationally as a network of anti-LGBTQ+ Christian activists.
