Russian immigrants, converts to "evangelical christianity," forming violent anti-gay groups in weste

Anti-Gay Movement of Immigrant Fundamentalist Christians Threatens

Western States

By Casey Sanchez, Intelligence Report

Posted on October 5, 2007, Printed on October 7, 2007

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."

On Sun, 07 Oct 2007 17:40:02 -0700, Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names

<PopUlist349@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Anti-Gay Movement of Immigrant Fundamentalist Christians Threatens

>Western States

How could that be? Are the Western States all gay? I thought

there were only red and blue states. Damn... I have to get caught up

on my latest news, or I won't have my political ducks in a row.

>By Casey Sanchez, Intelligence Report

>Posted on October 5, 2007, Printed on October 7, 2007

>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.

...and I suppose your advocacy of gun control would prevent

all this? No. If that woman had been armed, she could have had them

march right back to their vehicles and get the hell out of the park,

couldn't she?

>

>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,

...and how would they know a church was "anti-gay" if they

weren't members? Are they <good GRIEF!> - stereotyping?

>requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods

Gay neighbourhoods? Egad! Whatever happened to diversity?

Don't they allow heterosexuals to live there?

>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.

Actually, as with Sarah Brady and school shootings, it was

probably more a cause for a near orgasm on their part. After all, it's

been since the late '90s that any big incident involving someone gay

being targeted because of being gay for being beaten. They "needed"

this, and you can bet they spent plenty of time sitting around in

their gay neighbourhoods talking about "the next time".

>

>"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,"

You were one of the people who ridiculed Bush for his phrase

"Axis of evil", and rightfully so. He's an idiot, and the countries of

which he was speaking are no more inherently capable of being evil

than the US is. Now you're doing the same thing.

>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.

I don't believe that "hate crimes" claims should be widely

available to whoever wants to make them. Pardon me, but there are too

many of them, and they are harped on too much by tragedy whores who

hope to get something out of it, usually for nothing.

That said, why should someone receive a longer jail sentence

for a "hate" crime than for a "non hate crime"? If some idiot kicks

the crap out of someone because he took offense at something he said,

etc, why should that be any less serious than someone who beats the

crap out of someone who's gay just because he's gay? There are already

laws on the books about what you can or cannot do to other people

based on whether you do or do not like them. If you beat someone up

because they're gay and you're against gays, you will, and should go

to jail. Do you think people who do that should serve longer terms?

If you want to make this kind of thing less common, make sure

that cops and prosecutors who don't do their jobs in such cases for

personal reasons are punished, and I'm sure there are already plenty

of laws about that too, without bringing "hate" crimes into the mix.

>

>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.

I don't recall ever hearing that Falwell had advocated

gay-bashing.

>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."

Thus freedom of speech must be limited? Except perhaps that of

gay haters of heteroes who, while they don't gay-bash or advocate it,

nonetheless commit the sin of not approving, even if only mentioned

when asked? Puh-fucking-lease. I've heard enough of this crap.

Everyone wants to be part of some protected minority, and it's

ridiculous. You can't have more rights than other people because some

people don't like you. You deserve full protection under the law the

same as anyone else - THE SAME AS ANYONE ELSE.

If the "gay community" there feels they are being targeted

specifically, they can get the police to investigate. If the police

find that that is happening, it's the same thing as if someone was

plotting to get someone or a group of people beaten for any other

reason, and there are "conspiracy to commit" laws that cover such

things.

>

>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?'"

That's going a bit far. I think gay activists want "tolerance"

taught in schools in a way to kind of "make the world safe" for them.

I don't think it's right to teach pre-pubescent kids about sexual

issues however, but I don't think that anyone's trying to "make"

people's kids gay. Still, you can't blame some people for thinking so,

considering some of what has passed for "tolerance education"

recently.

>

>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.

That sounds a bit extreme. I don't suppose you'd care to share

the circumstances?

Just checked it out online.

It seems that she was "forcibly removed from an OCA campaign

meeting."

What the hell was she doing there? If he had showed up at a

gay rights activists meeting, would he not have been treated

similarly, albeit possibly more effetely?

I'll concede that he did not act appropriately, but I recall

seeing footage of a bunch of - pardon me - San Francisco fags

protesting someone who said something they didn't like, and shouting

"Bring back the lions!" (in reference to the minister who'd said it).

Funny thing was, it wasn't even anything about gays he'd said that

ticked them off so. Odd, eh?

>

>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.

I don't think Hitler was, but it is undoubtedly true that many

high-ranking Nazis were gay, and it was common among the "brownshirts"

as well in Nazism's early days.

>(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."

Oh well, if he said it then it has to be... wait a minute. Who

the hell is he? Sorry bud, but do a little research. The number of

high-ranking nazis who were gay WAS INDEED very disproportionate to

the population in general.

>

>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.

Okay, now that is DAMNED far fetched. The Taliban cut off

their heads, of course, and the Saudis presumably put them in prison.

How is it that this alliance is supposed to form? Mutual hatred of

George W. Bush?

>"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."

Not interested, unless the guitarists are better than Eddie

Van Halen, which they're not.

>

>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!!"

I think they have their priorities a bit skewed, don't you?

How can they dare to advocate deporting Russians when they didn't

advocate deporting Arabs after 911? That would have been wrong, but

they're being ridiculous in a VERY one sided and self serving way, it

seems.

>

>"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."

>

>

>