The
violently anti-gay group 'Watchmen on the Walls' will hold a conference this week in Lynnwood,
reports the blog BoxTurtle Bulletin. What the organizers are calling a "human rights" conference starts Friday and runs through the weekend at the Lynnwood Convention Center [
get directions, just in case... well, you know].
The Watchmen organization was founded by a group of homophobic extremists that includes Redmond's pastor Ken Hutcherson, Oregon activist Scott Lively, and Pastor Alexei Ledyaev of Riga, Latvia. The three of them will address the conference along with Bothell preacher and political-activist Joseph Fuiten and fringe-right Sacramento radio host Vlad Kusakin who also edits a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, according to
Casey Sanchez's superb report on the Watchmen.
The Watchmen claim credit for several demonstrations that have turned violent toward gay people, including protests against gay gathering in Riga, Latvia, and Kiev, Ukraine. Gay activists in Sacramento blame the
summer death of a young man there at least partly on the spirit of intolerance that had been generated in that city by Kusakin and local preachers at Slavic churches.
BoxTurtle's Jim Burroway discovered a transcript of a speech Scott Lively had given at an earlier Watchmen conference in which Lively offers this preposterously inaccurate tale of the Sacramento death:
...[W]e've come to a place in the United States where the homosexuals have achieved very high power. And they?ve begun to punish... They?ve begun to cause the political powers to punish anyone who says that homosexuality is wrong.
There was a situation in Sacramento a few weeks ago in a public park. There was a group of homosexuals and they were very drunk and one of the homosexual men was taking off his pants. And there were children in the park. And a Russian man went over to these homosexuals and he was rebuking them and there started a fight. And the Russian man punched the homosexual. ...
Now the Russian man has been accused of murder and the FBI is seeking him. And all of the powers in Sacramento have been accusing all of the Russian community of being murderers. And the goal is to silence everyone who speaks against homosexuality. And this is a very dangerous situation because we don?t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved. Amen?
Could have fooled us, Scott.
But this is one of the man who will be in Lynwood next weekend to talk at a "human rights" conference.
BoxTurtle offers this Google translation of the Lynnwood conference announcement.
Related items we'd missed:
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."
And one more: A Salon blog, "Bartholomew's Notes on Religion" has a review of the Lively/Latvia nexus that we've detailed here with some choice new links and quotations.
Oh, and had I not been a bit too busy of late with the nerdish underpinnings of "our" new blog site, I would surely have noticed this post by Postman that links to the Slog posts about the conference.
[This post originally appeared at this blog's former home at ttca.org.]