Box Turtle Bulletin

The Watchmen In Riga, Part 1: “Become A Missionary To America”

The Watchmen On the Walls held another conference two weeks ago, this time in Riga, Latvia, home of Alexey Ledyaev’s New Generation church. Ledyaev is one of the Watchmen’s founders, along with holocaust revisionist Scott Lively and Seattle-area pastor Kenneth Hutcherson. This latest conference garnered very little attention here in the States, but since Ledyaev’s New Generation church put the video of the entire conference on their web site, I thought it might be informative to learn what was discussed in Riga.

Pastor Alexey Ledyaev opened the conference on Wednesday evening, November 14, with a strident sermon on the weapons of spiritual warfare. While he described these “weapons” as spiritual in nature, the war metaphors were pushed to their most militant limits as he whipped the crowd into a frenzy:

Liberalism is penetrating into our brain, but we must return to the fundamental things and name things as they are. If God names it evil, then we must name it evil. When you tell the truth, strength comes to you.

…We’re in the war and we’re in it because of trophies — human souls.

Today our home is being ravaged before our eyes. Our weapons are being taken away. We were strong when we had those weapons.

Ledyaev stoked the crowd even further by describing the “danger” in the most ludicrous terms:

They are trying to wash our brains and explain that Bible is obsolete, that the form of the traditional family is obsolete. Today homosexualists boldly enter the schools with the bold slogan “Your kids are our kids. We will re-educate them.” Sexually immature kids are being seduced and taught about traditional and non-traditional sex. They are forced to cross-dress in order to feel which orientation is inside them. They are being told that if you are born as a boy, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will become a man. If you were born as a girl, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will become a woman. It’s all happening now.

The devil is ravaging our home and I want to ask our Church: where are we? We are told to surrender our weapons and be silent – but we are refusing to take this dictation down. Because we have another commander-in-chief and he tells us to act!

Things had calmed back a bit the following morning when American author and holocaust revisionist Scott Lively took the stage. And even though his talk was lower key than Ledyaev’s, it was no less provocative.

Lively began by bringing the conference up to date with the Watchmen’s activities over the previous months. He talked about going to Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, and then followed that with an account of the U.S. conferences in Sacramento and Seattle. And here’s where his grip on reality became somewhat tenuous. He began by talking about how the Watchmen had been “attacked” in a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

There’s an organization in the United States called the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is a very powerful and influential organization. This is an organization that got its start fighting against the Ku Klux Klan and racism in the Old South in the United States. And it became very famous for fighting against hate groups.

Then in about the nineteen nineties, then there was very, very little racism left in America. And this organization had no more people to investigate. So they picked a new target, what they called the Christian Right. Christian Conservatives. And they began taking the side of the homosexuals against the Christians.

Lively then went on to embellish the story about the attention the Watchmen received in Seattle:

The devil was trying to kill Watchmen On the Walls in Seattle. But God was with us. We had a very good conference and we got publicity throughout the whole state of Washington that we never would have had. But at the very beginning of the conference we held a press conference. And we met with the media and we told them who we were. And we wrote a statement about the Watchmen On the Walls and who we are. My translator, Lev here has translated it and it will be posted on the Watchmen On the Walls web site.

And the next morning, when we came to the conference, the sidewalks was filled with homosexuals with signs attacking us. And the media was back again. They were looking to see if there would be a fight. But what they saw was Christians coming to together to praise God and to stand strong on the values that he has given us about the family. And the next day, in the biggest newspaper in the whole state, was a very positive story about Watchmen On the Walls and about how it was not the hate group that we had been called. Glory to God! Hallelujah.

The largest newspaper in the state, The Seattle Times, did indeed write about the Watchmen. But it does not appear to draw any conclusions about who they are, as Lively claimed in Riga.

But Lively was clearly flattered by the attention, calling the Watchmen a very important international movement. And since they are now “very important,” they have to be careful with everything they say. “We have to understand that we are being watched by people all over the world. There are probably even homosexual spies in this room.”

These “spies,” Lively warned, would love nothing more than to catch someone associated with the Watchmen saying something ugly. And that’s where Lively coached his Russian-speaking audience with a new phrase that he claimed would inoculate them against the charges of being a hate group:

In America, the Christians have chosen a phrase that explains what we believe. And you may have heard this phrase. “We love the sinner, but hate the sin.” Amen? Okay. Say that with me. “We love the sinner, but hate the sin.” That must be your phrase because that will protect you from being misrepresented. And it will bring you in harmony with Christians around the world.

And with that, Lively went on to speak in those “harmonious” terms that many Christians all over the world have used to describe gays and lesbians:

You have to understand how this battle works. We follow the God of truth. They Holy Spirit, who is called the Spirit of Truth, lives inside of us. But our adversaries follow the father of lies. Scripture calls him the “father of lies.” They can’t tell the truth, and they to tell the truth because they don’t want people to listen to what we have to say. But we can’t say anything that would give them proof that what they teach is right… So we must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. We won’t stop telling the truth, and they won’t stop telling the lies. But this is a war.

That’s quite a long ways from loving the sinner.

Lively ended his talk that morning with an announcement that he and his wife will be moving to Springfield, Massachusetts to join a New Generation church which serves the Russian-speaking community there. And he invited others in Riga to join him in his quest to change America:

We’re going to Springfield as missionaries to America. We want to do the three tasks of the church. We want to take that goal of transforming society and to apply it in all the areas of life. And I want to invite you, whether you’re here in Riga, whether you’re watching on the Internet, or whether you’re watching on DVD, come to Springfield. Come and be part of the experiment. Help us to develop New Generation and the Watchmen On The Walls into the English-speaking world.

(Thanks to Ruslan Porshnev of the Russian LGBT web site Anti-Dogma, for generously providing the English translations of the Russian speakers at the conference. You can read more about his work here.)

See also:
The Watchmen In Riga, Part 1: “Become A Missionary To America”
The Watchmen In Riga, Part 2: From Babylon To Jerusalem
The Watchmen In Riga, Interlude: A Pastor’s Prayer
The Watchmen In Riga, Part 3: The “Secrets” Of Homosexuality
The Watchmen In Riga, Part 4: “A Militant Army Marching Against Evil”

Happy Thanksgiving / Musings From My Neck Of The Woods

Near as I can tell, Dave Muskera is living very near to where I grew up: on the Ohio River close to where Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia meet. And like me, he’s confused by what everyone means when they talk about “the gay lifestyle”:

Let me tell you what I think is a “lifestyle.” A friend of mind centers his life on football. His home is full of football memorabilia, he watches as many games in season as he can and it’s just about all he can talk about. He could surly be said to be leading a “football lifestyle”…

Let me close this by describing to you a gay man’s lifestyle. Are you ready for this?

I don’t think it’s unique. I know too many others like me (us) for that to be the case. We have a house, three bedrooms and two baths, two dogs and two cats. Occasionally we run the vac and dust a few of the things cluttering up the place. We cook meals, shop for groceries, pay bills, visit with neighbors and family, buy a new car occasionally, go to movies, rent DVDs, attend concerts, take vacations and shorter trips and rake leaves in the fall. In December we put up a tree and decorations. We make love or have sex – depending on the amount of energy left over after a week or so of work. We talk on the phone, use the computer and the Internet, go shopping, write long winded articles for the American Chronicle and sleep as needed. Is this the gay lifestyle? Well, for us, it is. Not exciting, but fulfilling.

It must be something in the Ohio River water. This “lifestyle” is something I’m thankful for. And believe it or not, I’m also thankful for having grown up where I did, difficulties and all.

What about you? What are you thankful for this year?

What’s In Your Future?

How about a spray-on condom:

The system works a bit like a car wash. The man put his penis in a chamber and presses a button to start the jets of liquid latex, sucked from a detachable cartridge. The rubber dries in seconds and is later rolled off and discarded like a conventional condom.

The aim is for the process to take just 10 seconds but at present the latex drying time is around 20 to 25 seconds. “We’re working to shorten that time,” said [Jan Vinzenz]  Krause.

The Obsession Of Social Conservatvies

Andrew Sullivan noticed this. If there was any doubt what’s most on the minds of social conservatives, Conservapedia has the answer. For those who haven’t heard, Conservapedia springs from the idea that Wikipedia and Google have a liberal bias. It’s an attempt to create a special little echo chamber in one small corner of the web.

So, what to social conservatives care about the most? Well out of 44,999 pages on the web site, here are the ten most popular:

1. Main Page [1,897,952]
2. Homosexuality [1,496,027]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis [516,229]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity [417,064]
5. Homosexuality and Parasites [387,476]
6. Homosexuality and Domestic Violence [329,295]
7. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea [328,327]
8. Gay Bowel Syndrome [318,139]
9. Homosexuality and Syphilis [262,286]
10. Homosexuality and Mental Health [253,125]

What do you think? Obsessed much?

CDC’s HIV Stats Higher Than Previously Thought

We mentioned that UNAIDS revised their estimates downward for the number of people worldwide infected with HIV. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is grappling with the opposite problem. The Washington Blade reports that the CDC is trying to figure out how to break the news that the annual number of new HIV infections in America are as much as fifty percent higher than the 40,000 or so per year they had previously estimated:

According to AIDS advocacy groups familiar with the CDC, middle level officials at the disease prevention agency have quietly confided in colleagues in professional and scientific circles that the number of new HIV infections now appears to be as high as 58,000 to 63,000 cases in the most recent 12-month period.

…CDC officials have told leaders of AIDS advocacy groups that the new figures are being withheld while they are subjected to a rigorous peer review process by an unidentified scientific journal, which is expected to publish the findings within the next few months.

Others familiar with the CDC have said CDC would likely publish the new data in its own journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

As of this morning, the CDC’s web site still cites the 40,000 figure for HIV infections. This tracks the actual number of AIDS diagnoses that the CDC counts each year.

Part of what the CDC is trying to grapple with is the political dimension of HIV/AIDS. Headlines screaming about a fifty percent spike in HIV infections are sure to provide a bonanza for anti-gay extremists. With that crowd, this news will be like winning the lottery.

But according to the Blade, the CDC’s experts believe that the dramatic increase doesn’t reflect an actual increase in HIV infections, but are the result of new requirements that states accurately track and report HIV test results. There has been mandatory reporting of AIDS diagnoses since the mid-1980’s, but requirements for mandatory reporting of HIV infections didn’t begin until more recently.

Before the new regulations took effect, the CDC’s methods for estimating the HIV infection rate was based on actual AIDS diagnoses. But HIV infection and AIDS are two different things: HIV is the virus which leads to an AIDS diagnosis some ten years after infection on average. What the CDC used to do to estimate the rate of HIV infections was to take the actual count of AIDS diagnosis and work backwards from there to arrive at an estimate of HIV infections.

But with the average ten year latency period between infection and AIDS, along with the fact that Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART) has lengthened this latency period for many people with HIV infection, the estimate has become grossly inaccurate. So now that states are required to report HIV infections as well as AIDS diagnosis, the CDC is getting a much better look at the actual rate of HIV infection.

Another factor which may be causing the HIV stats to rise could be the CDC’s latest recommendation that most adults in the US undergo an HIV test during routine doctor exams as well as hospital emergency room visits. This may be catching many people who either avoided HIV testing or who believed they weren’t at a significant risk for infection. So not only is the CDC now actually counting HIV infections instead of merely estimating them, their policies may have resulted in an increase in the number of people getting tested each year.

So far, the CDC doesn’t believe these new numbers represent a significant increase in actual HIV infections. Yearly AIDS diagnoses has held relatively steady for the past eight years, which suggests that the number of HIV infections leading to those diagnoses was probably fairly stable through the 1990’s. If the number of yearly AIDS diagnoses holds steady over the next several years, then that should validate the belief that there is no actual spike in HIV infections.

Three Sentenced in Michael Sandy’s Death

Last October, Michael Sandy, 29, was lured to a secluded beach in the New York area by three others who he met in an online chat room. At the beach, he was then assaulted and chased onto a busy freeway, where he was struck by a sport utility vehicle. He later died. The four men who were accused of planning the attack were arrested on hate crime charges. The police investigation showed that Sandy had been selected to be robbed because he was gay, believing a gay man would hesitate to resist or report the attack.

Gary Timmins, 17, pleaded guilty to attempted robbery with a hate crime enhancement. As part of his plea agreement, he testified against his friends in exchange for a four-year prison sentence. John Fox, 20, who posed as a gay man in the internet chat room was manslaughter and attempted robbery as hate crime and was sentenced to between 13 and 21 years in prison. Anthony Fortunato, 21, tried to avoid the hate crime enhancement by claiming he was gay himself. He was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime and was sentenced to 7 to 21 years. Ilya Shurov, 21, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempted robbery as hate crimes.

Despite the police and prosecutor’s determination that this was a hate crime, Michael Sandy’s high-profile death was not included in the FBI’s 2006 hate crimes statistics.

AIDS – Poppers Connection

Between the first reporting of a new “cancer” that was appearing in young gay men in 1981 and the discovery of HIV in 1984, there was a lot of speculation about why some men were getting sick and others were not.

One of the popular hypotheses was that the use of poppers (amyl nitrate, an inhalent that gives the user a rush) was the reason. With the discovery of HIV and further research into its methods of transmission, the poppers discussion was dismissed as nonsense.

Now, more than 20 years later, a study seems to confirm that early guesswork:

Researchers found that gay men who inhaled poppers during unprotected anal intercourse had a significantly increased risk of being infected with HIV. The investigators think there are two reasons why poppers are implicated in HIV transmission. Firstly, they facilitate longer and ‘rougher’ sexual intercourse; and secondly, poppers could increase biological susceptibility to infection, either by suppressing immune function or increasing uptake of body fluids.

UNAIDS “Cures” 6.3 Million With HIV

This is something that happens all too often. Say you’re a medical professional trying to understand the spread of a particularly sexually transmitted disease. What better place to go to study it than the local STD clinic? Just run a survey of the people who show up, and if you’re lucky and the findings are interesting — either they confirm something that others have suspected or they show something new and different from what was believed to be true before — you get to write up a research report, publish it in one of literally hundreds of professional journals, and your small contribution adds to the enormous body of knowledge which continues to accumulate about that disease.

If you’re unlucky however, someone else — say, an anti-gay activist — will read your report and they will write another report which says that everyone behaves just like your sample from the local STD clinic. They do this even though your sample is in no way representative of the general population, or even necessarily representative of STD clinics in other cities. But that’s how we get such nonsense as the so-called “Dutch Study.” Anti-gay activists claim that it “proves” that gay relationships last only 18 months on average and that gay men have some eight additional partners each year while in that relationship. Of course, this is not what that “Dutch Study” demonstrated at all. But no matter. They have their shocking statistic which they use quite often.

So what does it say about the state of our knowledge of the worldwide AIDS epidemic when we discover that epidemiologists — those who are tasked with studying the transmission and control of epidemic diseases — do the same thing as these anti-gay activists?

This morning’s New York Times reported that the UN agency UNAIDS issued a report acknowledging that it had been overestimating the size of the worldwide AIDS epidemic (PDF: 144KB/3 pages) by more than 6 million people, and that the epidemic actually peaked in the late 1990’s. And how did this happen? According to the New York Times:

Until recently, most national estimates were made by giving anonymous blood tests to some young women who came into public health clinics because they were pregnant or feared they had a sexually transmitted disease; those results were expanded with statistical models.

But epidemiologists have realized that such a method — usually applied in big urban clinics because it was more efficient — oversampled prostitutes, drug abusers and people with multiple partners, and ignored rural women. Then the statistical extrapolations exaggerated those errors.

Recognizing this elementary flaw — one they should have recognized from the beginning — UNAIDS now estimates that there are currently 33.2 million people infected with HIV, down from its estimate of 39.5 million from a year ago. It’s as if 16% of the world’s HIV-positive population was cured overnight.

Of course, we know that there was no miraculous cure. It’s just faulty math. And unfortunately, epidemiologists — the very people who should know better — are too often prone to making exactly this kind of error.

Some suggest that there may be political motivations involved in inflating the numbers. After all, jurisdictions which can show that they have a severe problem with a given disease can more easily qualify for grants, discounts, loans and other aid to fund research, prevention and treatment programs. If that’s the case, then this implies that one jurisdiction’s exaggeration may draw badly needed funds from other jurisdictions which act professionally and play by the rules.

It’s hard to tell if that’s a major problem with the UNAIDS surveillance program. Several African countries are now implementing more rigorous surveillance programs, while India has switched to a more representative household survey. UNAIDS says that these two developments are largely responsible for their estimate’s dramatic decrease. But there’s no question that HIV/AIDS is heavily politicized the world over.

I’m glad there are now 6 million fewer people with HIV in the world. It should still concern all of us that there are still maybe 33.2 million, more or less, with HIV. That’s the bigger picture we need to focus on.

But at the risk of drawing too much attention away from that more important picture, I’d like to suggest that there’s another lesson to be learned here. People and statistics are two entirely different things. And sometimes, when you really look at where statistics come from, you may discover that they have surprisingly little to do with the people they purportedly represent. Just try to ask those 6.3 million who were “cured.”

National Transgender Day of Rememberance

With all this talk about hate crime statistics, now’s a good time to mention that tomorrow, November 20, is the annual Transgender Day Of Remembrance. This day is set aside to remember those who have been killed due to anti-transgender violence. Those deaths, by the way, don’t show up in the FBI’s hate crime statistics because the current federal Hate Crime Reporting Act doesn’t address gender, gender identity or expression. You can learn more about transgender hate crimes at the Remembering Our Dead web site.

Crimes Based on Sexual Orientation Most Violent

Here’s a trend which continues to hold true:

Out of all the major categories, hate crime incidents motivated by sexual orientation are more likely to be crimes against persons (i.e. violent crimes) as opposed to crimes against property (robbery, vandalism, etc.). Only Ethnicity come close, and that is largely due to the recent surge in anti-Hispanic hate crimes for 2006.

But Hispanics and other ethnicities are currently protected by federal hate crimes laws. So is religion. Disability isn’t covered. And the same is true for one other category. Can you guess which one?

See also:

Hate Crime Statistics Released for 2006

Hate Crime Statistics Released for 2006

The FBI’s latest hate crime statistics are out for 2006. Here’s what it looks like compared to 2005:

Overall, hate crimes in 2006 went up a little more than 8% since 2005. Hate crimes based on religion went up by 283 incidents (an increase of 22% from 2004). Nearly two-thirds of those reports are anti-Jewish. Hate crimes based on sexual orientation experienced the second-largest jump, up by 244 incidents (an increase of 21%).

These FBI statistics rely on the voluntary cooperation of local law enforcement agencies to report hate crimes which occur in their jurisdictions. This reporting is not mandatory, nor is it funded. So not all agencies participate, and those that do often do so inconsistently.

 This year, there were 12,620 law enforcement agencies participating in the Hate Crimes reporting system, covering 255,086,543 of the U.S. population. That compares to 12,417 agencies in 2004 covering 245,006,413 of the U.S. population. Since that represents only a 4% growth in the population represented by these statistics, the much larger increase in hate crime incidents ought to be seen in a very disturbing light.

One of the things that jumped out at me is that there were no murders recorded for sexual orientation. The other thing that jumped out at me is that there was one anti-black murder, and two anti-white murders. So much for the “special rights” argument against hate crime laws.

But the fact that there were no murders based on sexual orientation meas that Jason Gage wasn’t counted. Neither was Michael Sandy. Maybe in Gage’s case subsequent investigations demonstrated that it wasn’t really a hate crime. (We know that prosecutors in the Sandy Case pressed the case as a hate crime). Or maybe, local police just didn’t bother to do the follow-up investigation required to make such a determination. Or maybe they just didn’t bother to file the reports. We don’t know.

But I’ve noted before that problems like these contribute to a likely significant undercount of total hate crime incidents for all categories. As I report in Daniel Fetty Doesn’t Count, it happens all too often.

See also:

Crimes Based on Sexual Orientation Most Violent

Senate Blocks Recess Appointments For Thanksgiving

Reacting to rumors that President Bush plans on making a recess appointment of Dr. James Holsinger to the post of Surgeon General, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, (D-NV), said he would schedule “pro forma” sessions during the next two weeks instead of going into recess over the Thanksgiving holidays. This leaves the Senate technically in session.

No recess, no recess appointment. No word on how the Senate plans to handle the Christmas holidays.

Flirting With A Westboro Man

Charles Firth is an Australian comedian living in the US. He appears on the ABC’s (Australian Brocasting Company) The Chaser’s War On Everything in a recurring segment called “Firth In America.” In this segment, he discovers the allure of a “Westboro Boi.”

AFA Finds Goldfish Sexy

At least that’s how it looks to me. The American Family Association sent out this Action Alert, alarmed that hotels are replacing Gideon Bibles with “Sex Kits.”:

Hotels replace Gideon Bibles with “sex kits”

Now is the time to let the hotel chains know that you want them to keep the Gideon Bibles

The latest fad with some hotels is to replace their Bibles with “intimancy [sic] kits.” For instance, at New York City’s trendy Soho Grand Hotel guests can enjoy a gourmet mini-bar, an iPod, a flat-screen TV and even the company of a complimentary pet goldfish. But no Bible.

That’s the problem with the AFA crowd. There’s no telling what they’ll find sexy.

Liberal Democrats Vow To Defeat Hate Crimes Bill

Well, not really, but what an ironic world we live in.

When the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act was being debated in the House, President Bush promised to veto the legislation. So when the Senate took up the measure, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) attached it to the Defense Authorization Bill in order to try to make it veto-proof. Now that the Defense Authorization Bill has passed both the House and Senate in two different forms, it now goes to a joint Congressional conference committee.

And that is where the trouble started. As many as 180 house conservatives (mostly Republican) who voted against the hate crimes bill threaten to vote against any defense authorization bill that would include the hate crimes provisions. And they will be joined by as many as 20 anti-war Democrats who vow to vote against the defense authorization because it will provide for the continuation of the Iraq war.

Now it looks like further action on the defense authorization bill will be delayed until early December. It’s unclear right now whether the hate crimes provisions will survive.