Box Turtle Bulletin

Brazilian activist takes on the Pope

This phrase, “The Jews are our Misfortune”, attributed to nationalist German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, became a motto of Der Stürmer, a Nazi publication. But the seeds planted by von Treitshke, though planted in a fertile ground of existing anti-Semetic hostility, didn’t bloom until long after his 1879 declaration (incidentally, three years after my German Jewish ancestors decided to find a new life in California).

Brazilian politician and activist Jean Wyllys sees parallels between von Treitscke’s demonization of German Jews and the Pope’s declaration that gay marriages threaten “the future of humanity itself”: (Ocio Gay)

Benedicto XVI no puede continuar difundiendo el odio y el prejuicio contra los gays. No puede decir que nosotros, sólo por amar, sólo por reclamar que nuestro amor sea respetado y reconocido, somos “una amenaza”. Por otra parte, porque ese tipo de frases tiene una historia. “¡Los judíos son nuestra desgracia!” (“Die Juden sind unser Unglück!”), dijo el historiador Heinrich von Treitschke, y esa desgraciada expresión, publicada en la revista alemana Der Sturmer y luego usada como lema por los nazis, terminó en lo que terminó. Los homosexuales también lo sabemos: nuestro destino en la Alemania nazi, donde Benedicto XVI pasó su juventud, era el mismo de los judíos, sólo que en vez de la estrella de David, lo que nos identificaba en los campos de concentración era el triángulo rosa. La tragedia del nazismo debería haber servido para aprender que el otro, el diferente, no es una amenaza, ni una desgracia, ni el enemigo. Y nosotros, los homosexuales, no amenazamos a nadie. Nuestro amor es tan bello y saludable como el de cualquiera. Y merecemos el mismo respeto y los mismos derechos que cualquiera.

De la misma manera que sucede ahora con el “matrimonio gay”, el matrimonio entre blancos y negros —llamado, en la época, “matrimonio interracial”— ya fue considerado “antinatural y contrario a la ley de Dios” y una amenaza contra la civilización. En una sentencia de 1966, un tribunal de Virginia que convalidó su prohibición usó estas palabras: “Dios Todopoderoso creó a la razas blanca, negra, amarilla, malaya y roja y las colocó en continentes separados. El hecho de que Él las haya separado demuestra que Él no tenía la intención de que las razas se mezclaran”. El matrimonio entre alemanes “de raza aria” y judíos también fue prohibido por Hitler. Hasta los evangélicos tuvieron el derecho al matrimonio negado en muchos países durante mucho tiempo, porque eran, también, una amenaza —para la Iglesia católica. Parece que algunos pastores no se acuerdan, pero fue así.

Google translation:

Benedict can not continue spreading hatred and prejudice against gays. You can not say that we only love, only to claim that our love is respected and recognized, are “a threat.” Moreover, because such words have a history. “The Jews are our misfortune!” (“Die Juden sind unser Unglück!”), The historian Heinrich von Treitschke, and that unfortunate expression, published in the German magazine Der Sturmer and then used as a slogan by the Nazis, ended in it ended. Homosexuals know: our fate in Nazi Germany, where Benedict XVI spent his youth, was the same as the Jews, only instead of the Star of David, which we identified in the concentration camps was the pink triangle . The tragedy of Nazism should have served to learn than the other, the different, not a threat, not a misfortune, not the enemy. And we, the homosexuals, not threaten anyone. Our love is so beautiful and healthy as anyone. And we deserve the same respect and rights as anyone else.

In the same way as happens now with the “gay marriage”, marriage between whites and blacks, called at the time, “interracial marriage” – and was considered “unnatural and contrary to the law of God” and a threat civilization. In a 1966 ruling of a court in Virginia upheld its ban used these words: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red and placed them on separate continents. The fact that he has separated the shows that he did not intend for the races to mix. ” The marriage of German “Aryan race” and was also banned Jews from Hitler. Even the evangelicals were denied the right to marriage in many countries for a long time, they were also a threat, the Catholic Church. It seems that some pastors do not remember, but it was so.

Nazi’s get blamed for the darndest things

Godwin’s rule says “”As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Well, it appears that Godwin’s Law applies to political rhetoric offline as well.

Take for example this very creative take on history from Glen Urquhart, a Republican congressional candidate in Delaware. Mr. Urquhart appears to be explaining why it is that he supports a theocracy.

Urquhart: Do you know where this phrase, “Separation of church and state” comes from? Anybody know?

Unidentified man: I do

I know. But I’m the history teacher.

It was a letter.

Urquhart: Actually, that’s exactly not in Jefferson’s letter to Dansbury Baptist. He was reassuring them that our government wouldn’t transform their religion.

The exact phrase, “Separation of Church and State” came out of Adolph Hitler’s mouth. That’s where it comes from.

Next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of church and state, ask them why they’re Nazis.

Perhaps Urquhart should have listened more closely to the history teacher and less to the AFA’s Bryan Fischer. On January 1, 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to Danbury Baptist Association in which he included the following now-famous phrase:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

And I’m pretty sure that Thomas Jefferson was not a Nazi.

LaBarbera Award: Rabbi Nachum Shifren

We’ve been predicting that somebody, somewhere would compare the peaceful, First Amendment-protected protests against the passage of California’s Proposition 8 to the Nazis and the Holocaust. Well, here it is:

We are dealing with the equivalent of a moral takeover of the country that has as its bedrock a belief in G-d and His promise for humanity. They don’t want civil rights! What they desire is quasi Gay/Lesbian hegemony, where a huge “bookburning,” reminiscent of the Nazis, will purge any remnants of the “Christian, White, mainstream America” that has given ALL AMERICANS the most profound scope of freedom, liberty, and justice that Mankind has yet to experience.

People have perhaps wondered: why the Mormons? Answer: they are a small, yet vocal Christian minority. They have been selected by the mobs as vulnerable, a group that might not have such massive support among America’s Christians.

We who are friends of the Mormons, their patriotism, their family values, will not falter in our continued support of these dear Americans. Let us recall the Christian minister Niemoller, whose admonition during those dark years of Nazi Germany moved us to our core:

“When they came for the gypsies, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a gypsy. When they came for the homosexuals, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a homosexual. When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I said nothing, because I wasn’t a Catholic……then they came for me, and there was no one left to defend me.”

That was penned by Rabbi Nachum Shifren in a piece he titled “We are all Mormons.” Jeremy Hooper was especially puzzled by Rabbi Shifren’s recognition in the last quoted paragraph that gays have, in fact, been persecuted:

But the really interesting thing for us? That Niemöller poem that Rabbi Shifren quotes did not, in its original form, even mention gays, yet here he has made a point of including homosexuals as one of the persecuted groups. Does he not see anything odd about that? Here he is going ballistic about the “immoral” gays and their “licentiousness,” yet he fully admits they have been (/still are) a persecuted minority? It just seems odd.

Very odd indeed. And it’s that strangeness which makes Rabbi Shifren a perfect candidate for the LaBarbera Award.

[Hat tip: Good As You]

When You’ve Run Out Of Rational Arguments…

… there’s always the Nazis to fall back on. This come from Randy Thomasson’s Campaign for Children and Families, who are calling for California’s County Clerks to violate the state’s recent Supreme Court ruling:

Ask your county clerk if they were a Nazi officer during WWII and had been ordered to gas the Jews, would they? At the Nuremberg trials, they would have been convicted of murder for following this immoral order.

Randy Thomasson is closely associated with the hate group Watchmen On the Walls. Founded by Scott Lively, Kenneth Hutcherson, Vlad Kusakin, and Alexei Ledyaev, members of the Watchmen have justified violence against LGBT people.

Thomasson is no stranger to false allegories like this one with the Nazis. He told a Watchmen gathering in Sacramento last fall that California’s laws protecting LGBT kids from bullying was tantamount to “moral rape.”

Update: Jeremy Hooper has now noticed that Thomasson has done some “cleansing” on his web site.

The Watchmen In Riga, Part 3: The “Secrets” Of Homosexuality

(This series on the Watchmen On the Walls conference in Riga, Latvia held Nov. 14-18 is based on the videos posted on the New Generation web site. Translations from Russian were generously provided by Ruslan Porshnev of the Russian LGBT web site Anti-Dogma.)

Last week, we devoted extensive coverage of the Watchmen On the Wall’s five-day conference in Riga in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, and yet with all that we’ve barely covered the first day and a half of the conference. Much of those first sessions were devoted to promoting a doom-and-gloom scenario of a world besieged by “the homosexual movement.” While I intend to pick up the pace and wrap things up more quickly than I started, I want to be sure that you are able to thoroughly understand what these mostly American anti-gay extremists are telling the rest of the world.

And if you think that what I presented so far covers just about every ugly word that can be said about homosexuality, you’re tragically mistaken because there was another set of themes that were explored on Friday morning that I found to be shocking. I left you last week with Alexey Ledyeav’s prayer which went, “In the name of Jesus I curse this phenomenon! I curse the root of this movement! In the name of Jesus I curse the culture of death and say to it: DRY OUT!… ” Now I want to share with you two talks which immediately preceded that prayer.

It all began when Scott Lively returned to the stage on Friday morning (November 16), this time promising a “university course on the things the homosexual movement does not want you to know.” And I have to say that this has to be the most amazing anti-gay talk I have ever heard — and remember, I sat through the Family Impact Summit in Florida last September. But nothing I heard there prepared me for Lively’s talk that morning. I don’t have the powers of written expression to fully convey how strange his talk was. That’s why I strongly encourage you to watch the video yourself. (Unfortunately, Lively doesn’t begin speaking until the 19:30 mark, but you can listen to Russian contemporary Christian music while you’re waiting.)

But I understand that not everyone can sit still for an hour-long anti-gay speech. So I’ll do the best I can with the highlights. Lively began his talk on the “secrets” of the homosexual movement this way:

“The first thing that the homosexuality community doesn’t want you to know, number one, most homosexuals do not want to be homosexual. Homosexuality is a disorder inside of you. It’s when you have an attraction, a sexual attraction, towards someone of the same gender. Every person that begins to feel this attraction towards someone of the same gender knows that it’s wrong, because they live in a world where they see what is normal and they can compare the way they feel with what everyone else does.

Lively explained that lots of teens experience same sex attractions during puberty, but most of them pass through this “phase” and the feelings go away. But for some, it’s becomes more than a phase:

But for some people, for different reasons, they don’t overcome it. But all of them know that it’s wrong, and almost all of them feel ashamed and they don’t want to have this. And so they begin to struggle against it. Inside themselves they struggle against the feelings. … But it’s also very difficult to overcome. And so what happens is they struggle and they struggle and they struggle against the feelings. And they fail and they fail and they fail and they fail. And then after a while, they give up struggling because its too hard to keep struggling against something that they can’t defeat. So they give in to the feelings.

This is the secret to why the homosexual movement is so aggressive about making society accept them. Because they’re living a lie about who they are. Their acceptance of a gay identity is an admission of failure. And so psychologically they turn it around. Because they feel so much shame, they create “gay pride.” And they insist that they’re full of pride about who they are. And it’s just a gigantic self-delusion. It’s a psychological self-defense mechanism. And it makes these people social activists. But that’s the first secret: most homosexuals do no want to be homosexual.

Lively’s explanation of the first “secret” is barely coherent. He doesn’t cite a single study, nor does he provide one scintilla of evidence — not even anecdotal evidence — that gays and lesbians who have come to terms with their sexuality “do not want to be homosexual.” Instead, he simply provides this explanation as though it were established fact. It’s a surprising “secret,” one which, I have to say, I have never heard in my nearly forty-seven years. It must be quite a secret indeed, one that even I am not privy to.

I really have no idea whatsoever where he could have gotten such an idea — unless the only gays and lesbians he’s ever met were members of ex-gay ministries. (He does mention ex-gays towards the end of this talk.) By definition, they don’t want to be gay. Is that where he got such a preposterous idea about gays and lesbians as a whole? If that’s the case, ex-gays would represent a rather unique echo-chamber which no reasonably intelligent person would mistake for being representative of gays and lesbians broadly. I suspect that most ex-gays would agree with me on that point at least. And so we’re left wondering where he could have discovered such a strange secret.

Lively continues:

The second secret of the gay movement has to do with the word “hatred.” Now, anyone who has stood up against homosexuality has been called a homophobe. … [T]here are two reasons for this, and many people know about the first reason. The first reason that they do this is to silence us. And that’s a kind of obvious thing.

But the second and more important thing is a secret. The homosexual leaders, the leaders of the homosexual movement, they are the ones who push this. Not the average homosexual. Of course many of them fall into using it as a tactic. But this aggressive accusation of hatred is coming from the homosexual leaders because they need to keep the other homosexuals inside of the gay community.

Remember, most homosexuals do not want to be homosexual. And if they really believed that there was a way to overcome their homosexuality, many of them would leave the gay community. And the people who have the real hope for change, the ones who have the ability to overcome their sins and their compulsiveness are the Christians. We’re the ones who have the power to help them. But the gay leaders can not let them know that. And so they have to keep calling us hateful bigots and they have to keep all of these gay people inside of their control. And they do this by making them afraid of us.

Here, Lively ascribes a degree of power wielded by “homosexual leaders” that few actual gay rights leaders would ever dream of. Lively says that the only reason most of us remain gay is because it’s the gay rights leaders are able to exercise some sort of mind control to make us afraid of Christians.

Did you get that? It’s the gay rights leaders who make the rest of us fearful. Not pastors who pray for curses. Not people who describe gays and lesbians as followers of the father if lies” or who write revisionist “history” books which claims that gays were responsible for Nazism and the holocaust. Not people who say that gays are subjecting children to “moral rape,” and who equate fair treatment in schools to the Nazi’s throwing children into the holocaust furnaces. And not people who lie about the gay-bashing death of Santender Singh..

No, it’s gay rights leaders who make gays and lesbians afraid of Lively’s brand of Christianity, according to Lively anyway.

Lively continued with secret number three:

The third secret of homosexuality has to do with this idea that homosexuals are born that way. Homosexuals are not born gay. God does not create people to have no choice in a behavior that he condemns. But it’s not the same kind of choice as choosing to become a carpenter or a journalist. Like I said, most homosexuals don’t want to have those feelings. But all sex is voluntary, except for rape. And so if a homosexual is living an active homosexual lifestyle, he is making a choice every single day.

Here, Lively plays a slight of hand, conflating behavior with orientation. It’s true that no behavior is compelled by circumstances of birth. And it is true that all consensual acts, including sex, are voluntary. But by confusing behavior with orientation, he performs a rhetorical trick which dismisses the very essence of what it means to be gay.

But having done that, it’s somewhat surprising that he goes back to cover the ground he skipped when he began revealing his thirds “secret”: Why are gay people gay? And here’s the thing that’s really fascinating.

I’ve been critical of anti-gay activists who claim that homosexuality is strictly the result of childhood experiences. I’ve also been critical of pro-gay activists who claim that science has proved that homosexuality is strictly biological in origin for all gays and lesbians. The fact is, neither extreme position has been proven to be true, and neither extreme position is likely to be true for all gays and lesbians.

But one thing that cannot be denied: Both sides are keenly interested in proving that their understanding of the origins of homosexuality is correct because they believe their framework bolsters their cause. And both sides eagerly tout every scientific finding that supports their beliefs while pretending the other findings don’t exist. Right?

Well, no. Lively has detected a different conspiracy. Hence the secret:

The real secret is that the gay movement does not want to find the cause of homosexuality. You understand what I’m saying? The gay movement does not want to find the cause. Why? Because the day that science finds the cause is the day that begins the race for the cure. Amen?

Think about it. If science were to come forward and say, “it is this gene,” then all of the secular people who don’t have any moral values, they would begin using the science, the gene selecting science that already exists to abort the children who have that gene. And the scientific community would be looking for a way to be able to prevent that gene from influencing the children. So whatever turns out to be the cause provides a place to begin searching for the cure.

And the gay leaders cannot allow this because they’re the ones who are so, … they’re insane, in their minds, because they are so deeply entrenched in this gay identify, they cannot leave it. They’re like the worst of the worst of the heroin addicts.

Here, at the mention of the word “addict,” Lively begins to turn toward the framework often employed by many leaders of the ex-gay movement by characterizing homosexuality as an addiction:

The most powerful addiction of all is sexual because we’re actually created to be sexual. Nobody’s created to be an alcoholic. When you give up alcohol, there’s nothing in your body that requires alcohol. But every body, male and female, is designed for sex. And the most powerful drug in all the universe is a human orgasm. It’s a human orgasm. Because when you have that sexual experience, it floods you brain with the same addictive chemicals that you get when you’re an addict. It’s like the ultimate pleasurable drug.

Now if you’re a young person and you’re experiencing same sex attraction, and someone comes along to you that’s an older homosexual and invites you to participate in a homosexual act, if you enter into that homosexual act and your first orgasm as a human being is the result of homosexual behavior, you can be locked in to an addiction that will last your whole life.

This strange theory is one which some anti-gay activists promote to explain how children and young adults are “recruited” into homosexuality. It’s this idea that some parts of our bodies are designed for sexual pleasure, and if our first experiences of that pleasure is associated with homosexual behavior, then presto! — we become gay due to some kind of Pavlovian conditioning. Some in the ex-gay movement offer similar theories of recruitment based on sexual molestation. I heard Christine Sneeringer of the Ft. Lauderdale ex-gay ministry Worthy Creations offer this explanation at last September’s Family Impact Summit in Tampa.

Lively ended his talk on an “ex-gay” who was dying of AIDS. The Livelys brought “Sonny” into their home and took care of him, and “Sonny” returned the favor by sharing these “secrets” with them before he died — which may partly explain the bizarreness of some of Lively’s “secrets.” Yet Lively used this story to build credibility for his “secrets” — after all, he got them from a pitiful former homosexual himself:

Sonny does not deserve our hate. He deserves our pity. And that’s who most of these people are. These are people who have become enslaved to a satanically inspired addiction. But their lives become so much defined by their perversion that they feel completely cut off form anyone else in the world. For these people the only hope is Jesus Christ and we are the only people that can bring them that message.

But the gay movement tells them that we hate them, we want to kill them and hurt them, and so they are afraid to talk to us. And so that’s another major secret. And you should take these secrets and use them to your advantage.

Lively said that there were more secrets, but he ran out of time and so “they’re going to have to wait for the next lecture.” That next lecture was given by George Neverov, a Sacramento resident who spoke on “Homosexuality Unmasked.” And just when it seemed that nothing could be more outrageous than Lively’s talk, Neverov began his talk this way:

…[The USA] has a terrible secret and this country is afraid to reveal it. It caught a horrible virus on which I’d like to talk with you. This virus has a damaging impact. It aims to destroy the family and it’s name is homosexual culture.

To illustrate what that virus is, Neverov began reading from an essay that was originally titled “Gay Revolutionary” (anti-gay extremists have dubbed it “The Gay Manifesto“), a satire that was written in 1987 by “Michael Swift” and published in the Gay Community News, a radical Boston-based newspaper that went out of business in 1992. The more extreme elements of the anti-gay movement like to quote from this fictional call to arms as though it were a real manifesto. This essay performs a very similar function in anti-gay circles that The Protocols of the Elders Of Zion once served among anti-Semites: To stir passions and outrage against a hated minority.

You’ve heard quotations from the so-called “Gay Manifesto” before, but it was probably very new and horrifying to that audience in Riga, as it is to many audiences in America. Neverov read along as a Russian translation of the text appeared on a giant multimedia screen behind him:

“We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, …”

And on it goes. Anti-gay extremists love reading this aloud to shocked audiences. But when they do, they invariably omit the preface. Neverov omitted it as well:

This essay is an outré, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor.

That’s right. It’s a work of fiction, a satire — and the author said so when it originally appeared in the Gay Community News way back in 1987. In fact, the anonymous writer used the pseudonym “Michael Swift,” which is an obvious tip of the hat to the English language’s most famous satirist, Jonathan Swift. But whether Neverov or any of the other Watchmen are aware of this for not, the Latvian audience is almost certain to be uninformed of the nature of this so-called “manifesto.” And so Neverov points to this fictional essay and tells his audience, “You and me — all of us are ‘hetero swine’ — and they tell us to tremble.” And then he reflects on what the supposed manifesto means for all of us:

I believe that outside the family, outside God’s design, a man gets into a psychological state where his soul is like a bucket without a bottom. No matter how much you pour into it, it’s impossible to achieve happiness, and that’s exactly the psychological state of homosexualists today.

This is often the reason why they are reaching for marriages. They just can’t get enough self-satisfaction. Their heart is on fire like in hell; they cannot satisfy themselves, so they want to sodomize the whole world — to have a broader choice for partners.

The rest of his talk continues along similarly alarmist lines as he focused on AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, complete with grotesque graphics on the multimedia screen:

This is a culture of death! But I won’t ever name homosexuality a culture. In all my publications you will see the word “culture” in quotes. Homosexuality does not have a culture: it’s immoral, and immoral means uncultured! And it destroys the human soul, emotions, healthy families! As we read in the manifesto, homosexuality aims to turn healthy families into hospital beds. That’s why this information is important to you! Your future depends on what you do with this information!

Neverov then goes though a long recitation (and butchering) of statistics and medical information about AIDS, some of it culled from such Cameronesque sources as LifeSite. Then Neverov closed his talk by issuing a stirring manifesto of his own:

Today those 3% of the population have dictated to my governor of California what they will teach my kids and it’s very funny and disgusting, but on the other hand they do not have any rights to my kids! They do not have any rights to kids at all because they cannot birth children and we will not give them ours kids! And if you are listening to this information through the Internet – I WON’T GIVE MY KIDS TO YOU!!!
…
Listen, my dear — I am now speaking to the Church! You are still standing on your knees and praying and telling me that I need to leave Sacramento!!! You tell us to leave this struggle for good! I will not leave it because those are bloody figures, they are written in blood.

And that’s when Alexey Ledyaev took the stage and offered his prayer for the morning.

(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”

The Watchmen In Riga, Part 2: From Babylon To Jerusalem

(This series on the Watchmen On the Walls conference in Riga, Latvia held Nov. 14-18 is based on the videos posted on the New Generation web site. Translations from Russian were generously provided by Ruslan Porshnev of the Russian LGBT web site Anti-Dogma.)

By mid-morning of the first full day (November 15) of the Watchmen On the Walls conference in Riga, Latvia, the audience experienced quite a few mood changes. The night before, they saw Pastor Alexey Ledyaev’s open the conference with a call to arms, followed by a much cooler talk by American author Scott Lively the following morning. But while Lively’s tone was a bit calmer than Ledyaev’s, his rhetoric was no less aggressive as he described gays and lesbians as followers of the “father of lies” while repeating the oft-repeated phrase heard throughout the conference, “this is a war.”

And war it was, at least rhetorically. And there’s a rhetorical holocaust going on — at least according to the man who took the podium after Lively’s talk that morning.

Vlad Kusakin is a Russian-speaking immigrant and Sacramento resident. He’s the owner of the Speaker Media Group which publishes a Russian-language newspaper in Sacramento and San Francisco, and he appears on Russian-language talk radio in the Sacramento area. Kusakin is also one of the Watchmen founders.

Kusakin regaled the Riga audience with his account of all of the horrible things that were about to befall Californians since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed SB 777 into law. That law simply adds non-discrimination protections to students based on sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and disability. But Kusakin’s reading of the law is much bleaker:

Many advocates in California have already expressed their views on this, and one of the comments by our partner, Randy Thomasson [of the Campaign for Children and Families — ed.], is as follows: “Arnold Schwarzenegger has let Californian kids into the arms of the aggressors, and now in Californian schools during lessons there will be a real moral rape of all students from kindergarten (5 year olds) to 12th graders of high school”.

I also commented on this situation the same way. I made a statement and I confirm it now: “More than 60 years ago someone gave an order in the Nazi’s camps to burn the kids in the furnaces. More than 60 years have passed since then, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, by his signature, opened the same furnaces in all of the public schools in California in order to burn and exterminate our kids.”

I am sure it looks exactly like this, and it is precisely extermination — complete moral extermination.

Kusakin then went on with more of his reaction to SB 777, where he apparently reaches a point of helpless desperation:

I was speechless and couldn’t think. I could not digest this information. I could not accept or believe that it’s real. I prayed and fasted and God gave me a message which I’d like to share with you today. I’m tired of living as being defeated. And I want to know, why are we always losing in California? When your pastor [Ledyaev] came to Sacramento, I asked him the same question: why are we losing and you are winning?

… I wanted to know the answer: why are we losing? Why are we just reacting? Oh my God, they signed Bill 777, what do we do now? Make a protest? Do a signature drive? We should do something! It gets scary! And we are rushing from one corner to another while the devil is demonically laughing at us and the homosexuals, who think we are worthless, spit on us.

One thing that is clear in reviewing the videos from the Watchmen conference is that many of the speakers are behaving as though they are in a desperate siege. In fact, the very name of the Watchmen On the Walls refers to the Old Testament story from Nehemiah, in which watchmen were placed on the newly restored walls of a ruined Jerusalem following the Babylonian exile during the 6th century, BCE. Those watchmen were to keep a lookout against the many powerful enemies which sought to prevent Jerusalem’s restoration.

If the modern-day Watchmen’s rhetoric tells us anything, it is that they appear to see themselves as standing amongst the ruins of a latter-day Jerusalem while surrounded by diabolical enemies on all sides. And as with men described by Nehemiah, the Watchmen see themselves as men of action. Kusakin concluded by noting that a long term strategy is needed, and he held the example of California, the modern-day Babylon, as a warning:

Above all of God’s grace, I see the fact of my personal defeat, the defeat of my church, the defeat of Christianity in the land where I live, and I do not agree with this. And I want things to change.

And God spoke to me from this point of view; I am absolutely happy now with his answer. I am tired of being a man who is only reacting. I want to be a man who does something — and not just something, but something he knows and understands. I am not against protests, I am not against letters to the governor, I am not against public events, but now I know one thing. All that should be only a part of a thorough strategy for 30-50 years.

If the Church doesn’t have this strategy, any victories we might have today in Latvia, the Church will lose if it doesn’t have a strategy. If you stood firmly on your positions this year and last year and formed a particular attitude in society, and if there’s no correct strategy for 30, 50, 100 years ahead, we will lose here in Latvia just like we are losing in the USA.

If Kusakin’s warning about the dangers of homosexuality sounded dire, those worries were compounded that afternoon when Don Feder took the stage. Feder is the author of Who’s Afraid of the Religious Right? To give you an idea of what this man is about, he describes himself this way on his web site:

I’m to the right of [Ariel] Sharon on Zionism, to the right of Pat Buchanan on immigration and Americanism, to the right of Mother Angelica on abortion, to the right of Chuck Heston on Second-Amendment rights, and generally make the legendary Atilla look like a limousine liberal.

If any of this appeals to you, read on. If not, look elsewhere.

At least he has a sense of humor about himself, although none of that humor was on display at Riga. Instead, he gave a talk on what he calls the “demographic winter,” which he began by showing a trailer of a forthcoming documentary by the same name. According to Feder, declining birth rates threaten the very future of Western civilization. In fact, Don Feder called this the “most pressing crisis confronting the human race”:

It’s not global warming, it’s not terrorism, it’s not AIDS — it’s not enough children. Too few people are having children today. Population decline is very much a reality.

If that sounds like fiction, it is. In fact, Feder encouraged his audience to read the novel The Children of Men, by P.D. James to understand what he believes the future looks like. In James’ book, the world was struck with a world-wide infertility crisis, and no children had been born for the past twenty-five years. As Feder described James’ book, the world would no longer have baptisms or children playing, and adults would have mass suicides for the elderly and people would loose interest in sex because “sex no longer has an ultimate meaning.” He then spent several minutes dwelling on this book while claiming that life is imitating this particular science fiction, “but it’s happening so gradually that only a few people can see it.” Feder, however, is one of those few.

Feder’s talk was an often contradictory mishmash of half-baked economic and xenophobic theories. Immigrants are having more children than native-born Europeans, and this, Don Feder believes, is the genesis of a non-Christian takeover of Europe. The culprits of this generational suicide include birth control, abortion, later marriages because women are staying in school, Hollywood (which doesn’t portray large families but promotes a “live for a moment ethic”), cohabitation, and homosexual marriage (“the one union that can’t possible produce children!”).

So now it’s mid-afternoon, and the audience had already by this time heard Scott Lively’s account of the battle between the followers of “The God of Truth” against those who follow the “Father Of Lies.” And they heard Vlad Kusakin bemoan the fact that in America at least, his side is losing. Feder reinforced that message with his dark predictions for the collapse of Western Civilization due to its inability to have large families.

But the Watchmen aren’t all about complaining and moaning, not by a long shot. As Kusakin said, they are also about action. We’ll investigate some of what that action looks like later.

(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”

The Watchmen: Protections for LGBT Youth Worse Than Holocaust Furnaces

Earlier this week, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed several pieces of legislation which improves the rights of LGBT residents of that state. Much of that legislation is designed to protect students from harassment and bullying in public schools by making sure teachers and school administrators fully understand their responsibilities to protect youth.

These protections for LGBT youth have generated howls of protest among leading anti-gay activists. Not the least of them are the Watchmen On the Walls, an emerging international anti-gay extremist group we’ve been monitoring recently. The Watchmen will be meeting in Lynnewood, Washington this weekend. We’ve already offered a preview of some of the virulent, hate-inducing rhetoric emanating from that group from a Watchmen conference held last August in Novosibirsk.

Another glimpse into what we might find at the upcoming confab can be found in last weekend’s Watchmen gathering in Sacramento to protest the governor’s latest moves. For example, Randy Thomasson of the Campaign for Children and Families spoke at that Watchmen meeting and said that the new laws in California will leave children “morally raped” in the classroom. And then there’s this, from a translation of the Watchmen’s Russian-language web site:

Vlad Kusakin, human rights activist and owner of “The Speaker” media holding company, told the audience: “Now it’s time to rescue our children from the public schools as from a hellish furnace. Just like one who would prescribe the burning of kids in the Nazi’s concentration camps furnaces, now 65 years later Arnold Schwarzenegger opened furnaces which are even worse for our children by his signature. Pray and fast for the kids and families of California and take your kids out of public schools”.

We earlier reported on Scott Lively’s influence in the Slavic-American evangelical community. That influence comes mainly from his book, The Pink Swastika, where he blames gay people as being behind the formation of the Nazi Party and carrying out the Holocaust. This theory has been readily accepted among a population who suffered mightily at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. You can see this reflected in Kusakin’s remarks.

Lively, who with Seattle-area pastor Kenneth Hutcherson, and Riga, Latvia megachurch pastor Alexey Ledyaev, founded the Watchmen. Lively also spoke in Sacramento. Again, according to the Russian language web site:

Scott Lively, human rights activist, historian and lawyer, stated that “in American legislatures there are ways to pass, as well as to repeal, any law. Therefore, the only thing we’re lacking in the struggle for Judeo-Christian morality is the unity of the churches and the courage of clergy. Let’s put away our denominational ambitions and unite our prayers and efforts for the sake of rescuing the civilization.”

George Neverov cited statistics on deaths and diseases among homosexuals, and he also demonstrated that 3% of population is dictating the moral principles of life for the rest of overwhelming majority: “For how long shall we cowardly bend before a morality that is alien to us? For how long shall we swallow all that loathsome stuff that is imposed on us by immoral law-makers and minorities? When, O Church, will you raise in prayer and spiritual battle over the land that is entrusted to you?”

Ken Hutchison dismissed objections to the Watchmen’s violent rhetoric, telling The Seattle Times: “You’re going to have extremists on any aspect on any teaching.” But these extremists aren’t just some fringe part of the Watchmen movement. Lively and Kusakin, along with Hutcherson, are among the most prominent U.S.-based leaders. In the Watchmen world, these guys don’t represent the extremes; they’re at the very the core of the movement.

The SPLC’s Casey Sanchez reported that the Watchmen “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.” Maybe it’s time we learned a little Russian.

Thanks to Ruslan Porshnev for his help with the translations.