Obviously American thugboys aren’t up to the job, so at least in the Pacific states, the hard right is reaching down a little deeper into the gutter.  Here comes the next phase in the right wing’s anti-gay jihad: the brownshirts.  Only this time, they’re Russian…

Anti-Gay Movement of Immigrant Fundamentalist Christians Threatens Western States

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.

You should read this whole article, particularly if you’re gay, or have gay friends or family living on the west coast.  I’m sure not all Russian immigrants are this violent, but some are affiliated with a church, and a movement, that specifically targets gay people for violence, in exactly the same way the brownshirts once targeted Jews.  Understand, this isn’t random violence due to an endemic hatred of gay people.  This is organized violence, and it’s organized from within their church…

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 [Alexey Ledyaev] 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.

And surprise, surprise, Oregon holocaust revisionist Scott Lively (he of The Pink Triangle fame) is now their "envoy".  Lively, as it turns out, and unsurprisingly, also has a connection to the Christian Reconstructionists…

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.

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.)

Washington State homophobic preacher Ken Hutcherson, who tried to single handedly torpedo that state’s antidiscriminaton law, is also on board with Ledyaev’s brownshirts…

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."

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.

Ledyaev and Lively have both refused to publicly condemn the murder of Satender Singh.  The message in that should be as crystal clear to the rest of us, as it is to their followers: Go, and do likewise…

But let it be said that the thuggishness of their flock isn’t limited to attacks on gay people.  In the comments to this AlterNet story, one person writes:

I taught in Sacramento. When we had the National Day of Silence at our school, aside from the traditional fundamentalist groups that opposed it, the Russian immigrant kids were down right rude, requiring removal from the class because they couldn’t respect people’s differences. Russian gangs in Sacramento, especially the Rancho Cordova area has been responsible for auto theft and chop shop operations, meth labs, and numerous murders. They are heavily connected through their church, and most of them will tell you that its because of the suppression in the former Soviet Union that their parents experienced. So, what you get is not just a born again mentality, but a born again and uber-survivorish type adherence to their version of scripture.

They are heavily connected through their church.  Looks like Ken Hutcherson has found his brothers in Christ. And so the face of the man who once said that to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself, was the highest commandment, is twisted into a gangsters leer.  If you thought the insular hatred of the bible belt south was the bottom of the gutter, you were wrong.  It has no bottom.

Our right simply to live, never mind to get married or hold down a job, has always been subject to the whims of hate.  Now that violent hate is being given an International organization from which to operate, and grow, and thrive.  By men of god.  In the name of Jesus.  But it would be a profound mistake to give this a Russian face.  There is violent anti-gay hate in many more parts of the world then Russia.  The men who are now developing, and those who are financing, this international anti-gay terrorism force have a large pool of potential soldiers to draw from.  They’ve been unsuccessful at turning the western world against its gay sons and daughters, so now they’re reaching out to the east, and the third world.  So Ahmanson brings the African church to America, if the American church won’t do his bidding.  So he, or other like minded right wing billionaires, may well be reaching out to Russia, and other nations, for willing murderers, to bring the war on gay people back to a satisfactory pace.  The new weapon against the American dream of liberty and justice for all, are the people of the lands where the Dream is unknown, or even hated as virulently as the American right hates it.