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Action Alert:  We need more sign-wavers next 2 days to ensure our
safety  in numbers:

Olympia's sign waving rally on Sunday the 1st (Black Lake Blvd & Cooper
Point Rd) was overtaken by bullies late in the afternoon.  The rally went
peacefully from 12 - 4 pm.  At 4 pm, Pastor Roy & his wife Valerie
appeared, (local leaders of the anti-gay "Reject" campaign who are based
in Dupont but lead a Church in Lacey).  They had summoned 40-50 young
men and a few young women who bullied us out of their way by jostling us and
blowing painfully loud air horns close to where we were already standing. 
They appeared to be almost entirely Russian immigrants from one of  the
Tacoma churches involved in the anti-gay campaign. I asked Pastor Roy &
Valerie to request their recruits to stop blaring the air horn in our ears and
not to bully our sign wavers.  Valerie blew me off and Pastor Roy just
walked away.  Ironically, last weekend when both sides were at the Lacey
rally, our side made it a point to be courteous, and I even intervened in a
few situations where Pastor Roy thought our people were being
aggressive.

This was a pretty scary encounter.  Most of our people
left, including one father with a toddler. Two organizers (including
myself) strongly encouraged the handful of supporters still there to leave in
pairs to be safe.

Please join us to ensure our safety in numbers and
stand up against intimidation:

Monday, Nov. 2nd:  Plum & Union
and Black Lake & Cooper Point Tuesday, Nov  3rd: Plum & Union and
Black Lake & Cooper Point For more info:  aschlecht@juno.com Please
uphold Washington's domestic partnership law - VOTE APPROVE on REFERENDUM
71.
Anti-Gay Movement of Immigrant Fundamentalist Christians Threatens Western States

From Southern Poverty Law Center:

By Casey Sanchez, SPLC Intelligence Report
Posted on October 5, 2007
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=809
http://www.alternet.org/story/64336/

On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death. The
26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend
outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age.
Singh was delicate and dateless -- two facts that did not go unnoticed
by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.

According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh
and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The
Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and
told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According
to Singh's friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home,
then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The
members of Singh's party, which included a woman six months pregnant,
became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked
them with their bodies.

The pregnant woman said she didn't want to fight them.

"We don't want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."

One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to
the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a
green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh's friends to
prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a
brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was
clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial
life support July 5.

Outside Singh's hospital room, more than 100 people held a vigil. Many
were Sacramento gay activists who didn't know Singh personally, but who
saw his death as the tragic but inevitable result of what they describe
as the growing threat of large numbers of Slavic anti-gay extremists,
most of them first- or second-generation immigrants from Russia, the
Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union, in their city
and others in the western United States.

In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking "Russian Baptists" and
Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to
anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed
Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay
neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and
lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have
roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh's death was the
realization of their worst fears.

"After a couple years of fundamentalist and Slavic Christian virulent
anti-gay protests at almost every Sacramento gay event in the region,"
said local gay rights activist Michael Gorman, "what the gay community
has feared for some time has finally happened."

The Watchmen

Gay rights activists blame Singh's death on what they call "The West
Coast connection" or the "U.S.-Latvia Axis of Hate," a reference to a
virulent Latvian megachurch preacher who has become a central figure in
the hard-line Slavic anti-gay movement in the West. And indeed, in
early August, authorities announced that two Slavic men, one of whom
had fled to Russia, were being charged in Singh's death, which they
characterized as a hate crime.

A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is
centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them
are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose
adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the
Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic
Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays
and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S.,
the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from
the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several
cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento,
Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in
Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in
Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has "made an
injection" of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into
traditionally liberal West Coast cities. "In those places where the
disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin," Kusakin said.

The anti-gay tactics of the Slavic evangelicals in the U.S. branch of
the Watchmen movement are just as crude and even more physically
abusive than Fred Phelps' infamous Westboro Baptist Church, and they're
rooted in gay-bashing theology that's even more hardcore than the late
Jerry Falwell's. Slavic anti-gay talk radio hosts and fundamentalist
preachers routinely deliver hateful screeds on the airwaves and from
the pulpit in their native tongue that, were they delivered in English,
would be a source of nationwide controversy.

Dennis Mangers, a gay former California state senator who now lobbies
for the cable industry, said that when he met a prominent leader of
Sacramento's Slavic community at a 2006 weekend reconciliation retreat,
the Slavic leader told him: "You have to understand, we equate
homosexuals with thieves, adulterers and murderers. ... You are an
abomination."

Current California State Sen. Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), who
rode in a dignitary car in Sacramento's 2006 gay pride parade, told The
Sacramento Bee he was shocked by the vitriolic comments shouted by
Slavic fundamentalist counter-demonstrators. "The words are vile ...
and words may give people the implicit license to take the next step
and hurt people."

Last summer, The Speaker, a Russian-language newspaper with an English
title in Sacramento, urged readers to attend a massive anti-gay rally:
"Make a choice. It's your decision. Homosexuality is knocking on your
doors and asking: 'Can I make your son gay and your daughter lesbian?'"

At that rally and others at the California Capitol, thousands of
Russian-speaking teens crowded the halls of the Capitol building
rotunda, wearing "Sodomy is a Sin" T-shirts. Scarf-wrapped babushkas
held up signs that read, "Perversion is never safe" and "I am not
learning about gay people."

'Masculine Christianity'

Last April in Salem, Ore., more than 700 Russian-speaking teenagers
rallied outside the state Capitol against a pair of gay rights bills.
It was the largest anti-gay protest to take place in Oregon's sleepy
capital city since 1992, when the anti-gay Oregon Citizens Alliance
(OCA) pushed a ballot initiative that came within a few percentage
points of rewording the state constitution to declare gay people
"abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse" and requiring the state to
fire all openly gay or lesbian public school teachers.

The executive director of the OCA at that time was Scott Lively, a
longtime anti-gay activist who is now the chief international envoy for
the Watchmen movement. Lively also is the former director of the
California chapter of the anti-gay American Family Association and the
founder of both Defend the Family Ministries and the Pro-Family Law
Center, which claims to be the country's "only legal organization
devoted exclusively to opposing the homosexual political agenda."

The Watchmen movement's strategy for combating the "disease" of
homosexuality calls for aggressive confrontation. "We church leaders
need to stop being such, for lack of a better word, sissies when it
comes to social and political issues," Lively argues in a
widely-circulated tract called Masculine Christianity. "For every
motherly, feminine ministry of the church such as a Crisis Pregnancy
Center or ex-gay support group we need a battle-hardened,
take-it-to-the-enemy masculine ministry like [the anti-abortion group]
Operation Rescue."

Lively identifies "the enemy" as not only homosexuals, but also what he
terms "homosexualists," a category that includes anyone, regardless of
sexual orientation, who "actively promotes homosexuality as morally and
socially equivalent to heterosexuality as a basis for social policy."

When he personally confronts the enemy, Lively practices what he
preaches when it comes to "battle-hardened" tactics. He recently was
ordered by a civil court judge to pay $20,000 to lesbian
photojournalist Catherine Stauffer for dragging her by the hair through
the halls of a Portland church in 1991.

The Pink Passport

Lively occasionally writes for Chalcedon Report, a journal published by
the Chalcedon Foundation, the leading Christian Reconstructionist
organization in the country. (Reconstructionists typically call for the
imposition of Old Testament law, including such draconian punishments
as stoning to death active homosexuals and children who curse their
parents, on the United States.) But he's most famous as the co-author
of The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party.

Published in 1995, the book is a breathtaking work of Holocaust
revisionism. It asserts that Hitler was gay -- a claim no serious
historian supports -- and that Hitler and other evil gay fascists were
central in forming the Nazi Party, operating the Third Reich and
orchestrating the Holocaust. (Lively's most recent book, The Poisoned
Stream, similarly details "a dark and powerful homosexual presence"
through "the Spanish Inquisition, the French 'Reign of Terror,' the era
of South African apartheid, and the two centuries of American Slavery.")

The Pink Swastika -- whose cover has a swastika in place of the "x" in
"homosexuality" in the book's subtitle -- has been roundly discredited
by legitimate historians and was thoroughly debunked in a 2005
Intelligence Report article. Stephen Feinstein, director of the Center
for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, said
the book was "produced by a right-wing Christian cult and is as correct
as flat earth theory."

Lively declined to answer several E-mails seeking comment.

Nevertheless, The Pink Swastika has become Lively's passport to fame
among anti-gay church leaders and their followers in Eastern Europe, as
well as Russian-speaking anti-gay activists in America. Lively
frequently speaks about the book and his broader anti-gay agenda in
churches, police academies and television news studios throughout the
former Soviet Union.

Lively credits the popularity of Russian-language translations of The
Pink Swastika to the support of Pastor Alexey Ledyaev, the head of the
New Generation Church, an evangelical Christian megachurch based in
Riga, the capital city of Latvia. New Generation has more than 200
satellite churches spread throughout Eastern Europe, Argentina, Israel
and the United States.

"One of my supporters gave him [Ledyaev] a copy of The Pink Swastika.
He was very impressed by it," Lively said in a December 2006 radio show
on WTTT-AM, based in Salem, Mass. "The European press was bashing them
[Ledyaev and his church] for being Nazis. He was finally thrilled that
he had something to counter the media with." Ledyaev did not respond to
E-mails seeking comment.

Since then, Lively said, "I've been deluged by media speaking offers all over the former Soviet Union."

In Sacramento, editorials in The Speaker urge readers to buy The Pink
Swastika. Even right-wing legislators in the California Assembly are
said to audibly groan when Slavic evangelicals wave a copy of the pink
volume during testimony.

Rock Operas and Reconstruction

The New Generation theology Ledyaev preaches borrows heavily from R.J.
Rushdoony, the late founding thinker of Christian Reconstruction.
Pastor Ledyaev's 2002 book, New World Order, calls for evangelical
Christians around the world to influence the wealthy and powerful in
their home countries to implement biblical law in order to stave off a
supposed alliance of gays and Muslims hell-bent on destroying
Christianity. "The first devastating wave of homosexuality makes a way
for the second and more dangerous wave of islamization [sic]," writes
Ledyaev.

Born in Kazakhstan, Ledyaev doesn't even speak fluent Latvian. But he's
quite proficient in the international language of the anti-gay
Christian Right. Ledyaev is close friends with Southern Baptist
televangelist Pat Robertson -- a man who once predicted God would
punish Florida with hurricanes and other disasters because Disney World
had allowed a "Gay Days" discount -- and was invited to the 2006
National Prayer Breakfast hosted by President George Bush.

At 56, Ledyaev is still youth-oriented enough to promote his vision of
global theocracy through elaborate, large-scale Christian rock operas
that Ledyaev writes, directs and stars in, and which are replete with
lasers, smoke machines, and spandex-clad actors in ghoulish makeup. One
of the rock operas, which young Russian-speaking anti-gay activists
promote on video-sharing websites, features a hero character wearing a
tuxedo battling men in black tights armed with tiki torches. Over
heavy-metal guitar riffs, a military-like chorus sings of "victory over
the gays."

In addition to Lively and Robertson, Ledyaev has cultivated the support
of Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the African-American founder of Antioch Bible
Church, a Seattle-area megachurch. "Hutch," as the ex-NFL player is
known, played a key role in persuading Microsoft to temporarily
withdraw its support for a Washington bill that would have made it
illegal to fire an employee for their sexual orientation. In 2004, his
"Mayday for Marriage" rally drew 20,000 people to the Seattle Mariner's
Safeco Field to oppose legalizing same-sex marriage.

One of Ledyaev's nephews saw Hutcherson speak in Seattle at a March
2006 debate on gay rights and arranged a meeting with the Latvian
pastor. By the end of the year, Hutcherson, Ledyaev and Lively had
teamed up with Vlad Kusakin, the editor of The Speaker, to form an
international alliance to oppose what Hutcherson characterizes as "the
homosexual movement saying they're a minority and that they need their
equal rights."

Walking the Gauntlet
They took the name Watchmen on the Walls from the Old Testament book of
Nehemiah, in which the "watchmen" guard the reconstruction of a ruined
Jerusalem. The cities they guard over today, say the contemporary
Watchmen, are being destroyed by homosexuality.

"Nehemiah stood by the destroyed city of Jerusalem. So are we standing
these days by the ruins of our legislative walls," Ledyaev says on the
Watchmen website. "Defending Christianity begins with the restoration
of the walls which is where the watchmen should stand up." The group's
mission is "to bring the laws of our nations in[to] full compliance
with the law of God."

During the past year, the Watchmen have met twice in the United States,
first in Sacramento, then in Bellevue, Wash. They gathered to
strategize against same-sex marriage and build a political organization
to fight "gay-straight alliances" in public schools and push for the
boycott of textbooks that mention homosexuality in any context other
than total condemnation.

The group has also convened outside America. In the summer of 2006, the
Watchmen and their supporters gathered in Riga, Latvia, to "protect the
city from a homosexual invasion." Gay rights activists in Europe
counter that it's gays who need protection from the Latvian capital,
not the other way around.

And, indeed, the city is a hotbed of violent homophobia. In 2005, for
example, a group of 100 gay activists, most of them from Western Europe
and Scandinavia, traveled to Riga to hold a gay rights march that was
widely viewed as the first real test of Latvia's official commitment to
freedom of assembly, a requirement for its tentative admission to the
European Union in 2004. Under heavy police escort, the gay rights
demonstrators walked a few blocks through a gauntlet of
ultranationalists, neo-Nazi skinheads, elderly women and youths wearing
"I Love New Generation" T-shirts. They were pelted with eggs, rotten
tomatoes and plastic bags full of feces.

The mayor of Riga at the time was Janic Smits, a close friend of Pastor
Ledyaev and a prominent member of his New Generation Church. During a
parliamentary debate on whether sexual orientation should be covered
under a national ban on discrimination, Smits quoted the Old Testament:
"If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them
have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their
blood shall be upon them." Last year, Smits was elevated to chair the
Latvian Parliament's Human Rights Commission.

Representing the White House?

When gay rights activists in Europe announced plans to hold a second
Riga Pride march in the summer of 2006, the City Council voted to ban
it. The gay rights protesters showed up anyway. Once again, they were
pelted with eggs, rotten produce and feces as they attempted to attend
services at an Anglican church that welcomed them. Swedish gay rights
activists said that a carload of violent anti-gay protesters tried to
force their taxi off the road.

Roving black jeeps with dark-tinted windows that carried anti-gay
activists were a new element at the 2006 march. Decals on the jeeps
bore the logo "No Pride" with a red line slashing through a circled
picture of two male stick figures having sex. No Pride is a group
organized and funded by New Generation Church member Igors Maslakovs.

A translator wearing a "No Pride" T-shirt bearing the same logo
accompanied Lively and Hutcherson during their March 2007 Watchmen tour
of Latvia. On that trip, Lively told a crowd of police officers that
"the gay movement is the most dangerous political movement on earth"
and repeated his claims that Riga is under siege by homosexuals,
despite the fact that thousands of anti-gay demonstrators had countered
the showing of just a few dozen gay rights marchers the summer before.

High on the Watchmen agenda during their March Latvia visit was
expressing their anger over a $7,179 donation the U.S. embassy in
Latvia made to Mozaika, a Latvian gay rights organization. The
four-figure sum is pocket lint in terms of U.S. foreign aid. (According
to tax records, nonprofit organizations run by Lively donated a similar
amount to anti-gay groups over the last two years.) But the Watchmen
didn't just protest the small donation. They did so in the name of the
Bush Administration. Hutcherson claimed that the White House had
appointed him a "special envoy" for "family values."

"I came to you representing the White House. In my country, people will
know how Latvia responded to anti-Christian statements," Hutcherson
told the Latvian parliament. "We need to stand for righteousness not
only morally, but also physically and financially. It's a great battle
for righteousness and no one can stop it. I promise to stand with you."

Hutcherson later said that he was designated a White House envoy during
a February 2007 meeting between himself, Ledyaev and Jay Hein, the head
of the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
Hutcherson claims he has a videotape of this meeting, but so far has
refused to release it.

In a written statement, White House spokesperson Alyssa J. McLenning
refuted Hutcherson's claim: "The White House Office of Faith-based and
Community Initiatives did not give Hutcherson the title, 'Special Envoy
for Adoptions, Family Values, Religious Freedom, and Medical Relief.'
The White House did not give Hutcherson any other titles and did not
coordinate with Hutcherson on his recent trip to Latvia." Impersonating
a diplomat is a felony, but the White House apparently is not pursuing
the matter.

A Contagious Disease

Soon after returning from the March trip, Lively visited a
Russian-language evangelical church in Salem, Ore., where he screened a
video documenting the Watchmen's activities in Latvia. The 45-minute
tape repeatedly refers to gays as "terrorists" alongside footage of
Ledyaev leading crowds in a chant: "In the name of Jesus Christ, we
curse the name of homosexuality!"

In a speech given after Riga's first gay pride parade in 2005, Ledyaev
told his international congregation: "Homosexuality is a ... dangerous
and contagious disease. The contagious should be isolated and treated.
Otherwise, an epidemic will sweep through the entire community."

Lively echoed his Latvian ally's comparison of homosexuality to disease
in a 2003 letter to the editor published in The Washington Times. "The
homosexual movement in a society is analogous to the AIDS virus in the
human body," Lively wrote. "It is not benign but destructive; it
thrives at the expense of the host, and you're most likely to get it by
saying yes to sodomy."

The Watchmen portray the battle against gay rights as nothing less than
a biblical clash of civilizations. "The homosexual sexual ethic" and
"family-based society" are at war, Lively proclaimed in his letter to
The Washington Times. "One must prevail at the expense of the other."

That sort of militant rhetoric is standard among Watchmen followers on
both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Speaking to his American counterparts
in a Watchmen video, a Latvian anti-gay activist intones: "Your
generation beat the Nazis, and our country beat the Communists.
Together we will defeat the homosexuals!"

Outnumbered and Fearful

Anti-immigrant sentiments already were rising among Sacramento gays and
lesbians prior to Singh's murder. Slavic immigrant chants of "Repent,
Sodomites!" at anti-gay demonstrations were frequently countered with
shouts of "Go back to Russia!" Since the killing, anger at the local
Slavic evangelical community has reached the boiling point. One typical
online posting to a Craigslist Web forum was titled, "DEPORT RUSSIANS
NOW!!"

"Satender Singh is just the beginning of the [P]andora's box," it read.
"They come here [as] religious refugees and turn their newfound freedom
on our citizenry. If they are going to [cite] evangelical religious
rhetoric, then I say give some Old [Testament] eye for eye."

The situation heated up further on Aug. 7, when Sacramento authorities
charged Andrey Vusik, 29, with involuntary manslaughter as a hate crime
in Singh's death, saying that the evidence did not show intent to kill.
Vusik, leaving a wife and children in West Sacramento, fled to Russia
in July, they said, and is being sought by the FBI. A second suspect,
Aleksandr Shevchenko, 21, was arrested at his home and charged with
intimidation and interfering with a victim's rights, also as a hate
crime. Authorities roundly dismissed the claims of Vusik's wife, who
told The Sacramento Bee that her husband acted in self-defense after
Singh's party became raucous and sexually provocative, shocking her
"Christian" family. No independent witnesses or members of Singh's
party supported that version, detectives said.

Meanwhile, Ledyaev and Lively have contributed to the tension by
refusing to publicly condemn Singh's murder. Vlad Kusakin, editor of
The Speaker, called the killing "tragic" but criticized The Sacramento
Bee for publicizing the details of the murder, alleging that the
newspaper was engaged in a Nazi-style propaganda campaign against
Slavic Christians.

Between 80,000 and 100,000 Slavic immigrants live in the Sacramento
region, the highest concentration in the United States, and the city is
home to some 70 Russian fundamentalist congregations. A third of the
Slavic population considers themselves evangelicals or "Russian
Baptists," a doctrine that is unrelated ideologically or
organizationally to American Baptist churches. (Ironically, many of
them emigrated to the United States beginning in the late 1980s to
escape religious persecution in what was then still part of the Soviet
Union.) Meanwhile, nearly 10% of the actual city of Sacramento's
450,000 residents openly identify as gay or lesbian -- almost 45,000
men and women. Only a small handful of cities, like Seattle and San
Francisco, boast higher percentages of openly gay and lesbian residents.

The disparity in numbers has not gone unnoticed. Even though many
Slavic immigrants are not homophobic, there's a new and uneasy feeling
among Sacramento's gay and lesbian population of being outnumbered by
people who hate homosexuals in a city that has long been considered
gay-friendly.

Florin Ciuriuc, a former executive director of the Slavic Community
Center of Sacramento, told The Sacramento Bee earlier this year that he
stopped leading anti-gay protests among his countrymen because "I saw
that people were hungry for violence, for blood." Ciuric added, "I
don't want people from my community killing each other or other people
because they are getting aggressive."

Sacramento gay and lesbian rights advocate Wendy Hill, 33, said that
when she came of age as a lesbian in the mid-1990s, Sacramento was a
safer place. "As a college student, you pushed the envelope. You walked
down the street hand-in-hand with another girl, even if you weren't
dating." Now, Hill says, after a group of rowdy Russian-speaking
protesters showed up outside her house one morning, "I get afraid of
that now, walking hand in hand with my wife."

Hill, who has served on the board of several local gay and lesbian
organizations, says that she first became aware of the city's large and
increasingly militant anti-gay Slavic population in the spring of 2006
when she attended "Queer Youth Advocacy Day," a lobbying event at which
around two dozen young gay rights activists were confronted by 350
anti-gay demonstrators. "I'd say about 90% to 95% were from Slavic
churches," she said. "They were blocking sidewalks, physically
intimidating. ... We realized how complacent we had become. We weren't
used to that type of behavior."

Hill and her partner of eight years have two young children, a
3-year-old and a 1-year old. They used to consider Sacramento a safe
place for a lesbian couple to raise a family. Now they're not so sure.
"It scares me," Hill says, "to think that's something going to happen
to my daughter because of who her parents are."

© 2009 SPLC Intelligence Report All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/64336/