Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

UK Gay News is a website that has -- along with its wonderfully inclusive daily summery of gay-related news stories -- done more than any other to recount the frightening flowering of often-violent homophobia that has accompanied the re-emergence of religious institutions in the countries of the former Soviet bloc.

This week, their focus turned slightly to the west as Eastern European homophobes prepare to meet with some of their American fellow-travelers in Lynnwood.

UK Gay News combines a summary of the week's developments here with one of those lessons in Latvian politics that has become so oddly relevant in the Pacific Northwest.

The Russian-language preacher, Alexey Ledyaev, who is scheduled to be here for the weekend conference, runs his radio ministry -- called New Generation Church -- from Latvia's capital city Riga. Ledyaev is closely allied with a right-wing party that is part of a coalition that controls the government there.

While the quasi-governmental body that runs Lynnwood's convention center still insists that booking a radical hate group at the facility was the proper thing to do, European officials haven't been so willing to tolerate the intolerance that characterizes the group that will be here.

According to the UK Gay News story, Euro human rights officials recently refused invite one of Ledyaev's political cronies to a meeting even though the Latvian politician -- Janis Smits -- holds the official ministry position that makes him responsible for human rights issues in the country.

This week, Andreas Gross, rapporteur of the Judicial and Human Rights Committee of the Council of Europe?s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), was in Latvia and invited the Latvian Parliamentary Social Affairs and Human Rights Committee to lunch.

Well, not quite all of the committee. Excluded was chairperson Janis Smits, whose homophobic outbursts are legendary. ...

Janis Smits is no stranger to "anti-gay" demonstrations in Latvia. While he is not known to have been seen wearing one of the "No Pederasts" t-shirts, he has been seen ? even photographed ? with placards containing the "No Pederasts" symbol at anti-gay pride rallies.

The Council of Europe group that's more familiar with what Ledyaev, Smits, and their cohorts are doing in Europe judged Smits unworthy of contributing to a discussion about human rights.

The folks in Lynnwood might have been -- as some of them are now claiming -- confused about the group's name and about its purpose, but Hutcherson's involvement with the conference should have allowed them to figure it all out if only they'd done a bit of research.

: post mirrored from seaQwa.com

Labels: bigotry, events, ken hutcherson, latvia, scott lively, state:WA, watchmen

According to figures posted on the Lynnwood Convention Center's website, organizers of the hate-group conference scheduled for the center over the weekend expect 700 people to attend the event.

They'll be sharing the center with "Cruise Center's Annual Cruise Show" expected to attract about 200 people with "free admission." But they all will likely be swamped by the 2000 people expected over the weekend to attend the "Digital Photo Expo."

At least we can expect that there will be plenty of photos if anything of note happens at the center.

Labels: ken hutcherson, scott lively

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:

• David Schmader posted a scary summary on Slog of the Watchmen sent him by BoxTurtle's Jim Burroway here, along with links to prior Slog coverage of the conference.
• Pam Spaulding today offers a summary of the conference at Pandagon.
• She points to a post about the conference at Orcinus:

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.

Labels: ken hutcherson, latvia, religion, scott lively

AlterNet offers a great report today by Casey Sanchez of Intelligence Report. The extensive report begins and ends with the tragic death of a Sacramento man. In between, Sanchez ties together the international anti-gay evangelical cabal spearheaded by Lativia-based preacher Alexey Ledyaev. It's a movement -- centered in the US in Sacramento -- from which Redmond pastor Ken Hutcherson and Oregon anti-gay activist Scott Lively draw considerable support.

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. ...

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."

We've mentioned Ledyaev before in posts about Hutcherson's Lativian nexus, but the Sanchez's article offers a wealth of new details, including this odd detail:

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."

More significantly, however, the article gives details of the theological underpinnings of the pastor's homophobia:

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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!"

Unfortunately, it's an article well worth reading around here because we have two of the movement's leaders in our backyard.

[8:20am. Updated lede.]

Labels: activism, ken hutcherson, latvia, religion, scott lively