After four years of foot dragging by Ponsor, Liberty Counsel filed a motion that forced him to either rule or allow us to appeal the lack of a ruling. He then did what he was always legally obligated to do: dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction (because the ATS was no longer operable). BUT what typically would have been a single line or paragraph announcing the dismissal was written like a ruling against me. I doubt he even wrote it himself it was so childish and polemical – like a guest opinion in a junior college newspaper, filled with invective and irrationality. Yet, on its face it looked like the official ruling of a federal court, so when the lead SMUG attorney publicly stated they would use this “ruling” in foreign courts to go after pro-family activists like me, we were ethically obligated to appeal our “win” to prevent that strategy from harming other Christians in foreign jurisdictions who would not realize the rhetoric in the “ruling” was not legally binding. After another 18 months – and a total of $1.5 million spent by Liberty Counsel over the full six and a half years – we finally got the federal appeals court to put that in writing, so finally the case was over.

In a major spiritual twist, three days prior to that final event, Val Kalende, Kato’s successor as head of SMUG in Uganda contacted my attorney to say she had accepted Christ, repented of lesbianism and wanted to apologize to Scott Lively for everything SMUG and its attorneys had done to me.

I’m still waiting for an apology from the person most responsible for my ordeal: Judge Michael Ponsor, the ethicist.