In a column for conspiracy website and “Birther” hub World Net Daily, anti-LGBT pastor and activist Scott Lively claimed that LGBT people are responsible for Russia’s invasion of the Crimean peninsula.

According to Right Wing Watch, Lively also claimed that the U.S. is trailing Russia on the question of human rights.

In the column, titled “Russia set to supplant U.S. as human rights leader,” Lively claimed that according LGBT Americans the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts is, in truth, “creating special rights for favored groups,” which will result “in a death spiral of moral and ethical degeneracy.”

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“Today,” Lively fumed, “both the Magna Carta and the First Amendment are deemed to be trumped by the ‘right to sodomy’ in case after case, and pro-homosexual activist federal judges in the U.S. are striking down ‘Defense of Marriage’ laws in the most morally conservative states in the union with brazen disregard for the Constitution and the will of the people.”

He continued, “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?”

Lively is referring to Russia’s so-called “Gay Propaganda” law, which has made any non-negative statements or depictions of same-sex relationships illegal. Lively was instrumental in helping craft the law, which has led to vicious persecution of LGBT people in the former Soviet Union.

The American pastor — who is known as one of the U.S.’s most shrill and outspoken anti-LGBT activists — was also deeply involved in helping Ugandan lawmakers write their own anti-LGBT law, which initially punished homosexual acts with execution. Before passing the law, Uganda lessened the death penalty to life in prison.

“Russia appears to be returning to its pre-Soviet understanding that humans are made in the image of God,” Lively wrote on Tuesday, “and that our ‘rights’ are really duties of respect and care for each other imposed on us by Him.”

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“(T)his is why the greatest point of conflict between the U.S. and Russia is the question of homosexuality,” he posited, adding, “I believe even the conflict in Ukraine is being driven to a large extent by this issue, at least on the part of the Obama State Department and the homosexualist leaders of the EU.”

As a result, Lively wrote, “America is in decline and Russia is on the ascendancy in the matter of human rights. America has largely turned her back on God, reorganized her government and culture on a statist model and is plummeting in a death spiral of moral and ethical degeneracy.”

“Conversely, Russia has begun embracing Christian values regarding family issues, albeit imperfectly, in stark contrast to its aggressively godless Soviet past. Repression in Russia is decreasing as rapidly as it is increasing in the U.S.,” he said.