The curtain rises and out come the haters
Recently, I read something that scared the pants off me. It seems that members of Christian hate groups founded in the former Soviet Union are actively migrating to gay-tolerant areas on the West Coast of America with the expressed purpose of shutting that tolerance down.
A number of hate crimes and now a murder have highlighted the problem, with the bashing death of a young man by Slavic Christians setting off a tinderbox around the issue in the city of Sacramento. Traditionally tolerant gay residents are calling for a ban on Slavic immigration in response.
Ukrainian and Russian-speaking migrants are at the heart of the problem, particularly those who are members of Christian Reconstructionist churches whose stated goals can only be described as doing for Christianity what the Taliban did for Islam.
In a Reconstructionist world all Christian nations would be theocracies with criminal codes based on Old Testament law -“ meaning barbaric punishments for trivial offences and the death penalty for homosexuality.
Of course it hasn’t just been a one-way transaction -“ Christians from America’s Evangelical and Pentecostal far right have been doing furious missionary work in the former Eastern Block ever since the break-up of the USSR.
The groups of most concern are the Latvian-based New Generation Church, and the Watchmen on the Walls, both of whom actively promote the Holocaust revisionist theories of Pink Swastika author Scott Lively. Lively is active in the movement and has travelled throughout Eastern Europe to rally gay hate groups trying to ban Pride marches and wind back gay rights.
His discredited conspiracy theories effectively blame the Nazis’ gay victims for their own deaths by claiming the Nazi movement was the work of a cabal of gay men. Another book by Lively blames homosexuals for everything from the Spanish Inquisition to the US slave trade.
New Generation have taken this bizarre thinking a step further by claiming there is a secret alliance between the international gay rights movement and Islamists who ironically want to do exactly what the Reconstructionists do, just in the name of Islam instead.
Russian language newspapers have taken up the call in Sacramento, and copies of the Pink Swastika are being waved around the California State Assembly when it hears testimony on gay rights reforms.
And while there’s no suggestion that these groups have Australia on their radar yet, it begs a question: instead of bashing Sudanese refugees for not settling in properly because one of their own was killed, if the government must introduce a jingoistic citizenship test, why not have a question that ensures migrants know that GLBT people are protected under Australian law?
I’m not suggesting migrants should be barred from citizenship based on their views on homosexuality, but they should be told what they’re signing on for and the consequences of ignoring those protections. It’s got to me more important than knowing who Don Bradman was.
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