The Transformations Band—"All the way from Federal Way"—is praising God with electric guitars. Their audience is hundreds of hands-raised, Russian-speaking Christian conservatives, many of them teenagers, assembled in Lynnwood's small convention hall. The young men wear fashionably tight jeans with leather jackets. The young women favor fishnet stockings and fishnet tops, along with high-heeled leather boots. There are parents in the room, too, more conservatively dressed, some of them with their eyes on strollers parked in the aisles. There are also grandparents: drab clothes, heavy overcoats, heavy accents, head scarves on the women.
In the front row sit a bunch of stern-looking middle-aged men, Bibles in hand, none of them Russian-speaking immigrants. These are the American leaders of Watchmen on the Walls, an international antigay group devoted to riling up Christian immigrants with rhetoric that the Southern Poverty Law Center recently described as "extremist," and probably inflammatory enough to qualify the Watchmen for "hate group" status.
One of these men is Scott Lively, a lawyer from California whose book, The Pink Swastika, contends that homosexuals masterminded the Holocaust, and whose record, according to the Law Center, includes being ordered in 1991 by a civil court judge in Portland to pay $20,000 in damages to a lesbian photojournalist whom he dragged by the hair through a church. Near Lively is Ken Hutcherson, the pastor of Redmond's Antioch Bible Church, who has made a name for himself in Washington State by fighting civil equality for gays and lesbians. Hutcherson has taken on Microsoft over its support for a domestic-partnership bill, cheered the recent state supreme court ruling against gay marriage, and threatened opponents with grandiose boycott schemes—and, when those failed, God's wrath. ("Everyone remembers him from his debate with Ron Simonson," the emcee says fondly of Hutcherson, mangling the name of King County Executive Ron Sims.)
The band finishes, hands stop reaching for the heavens, and Lively ascends the stage. He is upset about the negative media attention the Watchmen have received in the lead-up to this evening, the October 19 opening of their sixth convention. (Other recent conventions have been in Bellevue; Riga, the Latvian capital; and Sacramento, California.)
"We are the Watchmen on the Walls," Lively announces to the crowd. "We are a global coalition of men and women of every race, color, and nationality who believe in the superiority of the natural family and marriage between one man and one woman. We are against cohabitation, divorce, abortion, adultery, and other behaviors that weaken the marriage-based society on which civilization depends. But we are especially focused against homosexuality, because those who practice this self-destructive vice, and have organized themselves into a political movement, are the chief enemies of the natural family."
Next Lively offers a disclaimer: "We do not promote or condone violence." It's quickly followed by more defiance: "We do not apologize for opposing homosexuality because it is morally, physically, psychologically, and socially wrong, unnatural, and harmful." Technically, Lively's statements do stop short of explicit calls to violent action, but they clearly lay the foundation upon which an impressionable and/or agitated mind could come to the conclusion that violence might be necessary to defend the Watchmen from their "enemies."
For the Lynnwood conference, the Watchmen have attempted to restrict photography and filming by members of the media, but cameras operated by the Watchmen are positioned all over the room, capturing Lively's speech and the rest of the proceedings (and capturing the emcee's recurring contention that the event is taking place "in Seattle," which is not the case). The audience is told that videotapes of the conference will later be available for purchase, suggesting that the "in Seattle" mantra is probably intended for a global audience that will be watching after the fact, and won't know the difference.
A dynamic preacher comes next to the microphone and, in a more direct fundraising ploy, asks the immigrants to donate to the Watchmen, threatening not to preach the next day unless they are sufficiently generous. Blue buckets are passed along the aisles.
The next morning, October 20, about 150 protesters gather on the sidewalks outside the convention center. Signs read: "Go Back to Russia" and "Take Your Hate Back Where It Came From." There are fewer people inside attending the Watchmen's conference this day, and organizers concede this is likely because turnout has been depressed by the counterrally. Still, the leaders of the Watchmen press their case, playing to the anxieties of their audience: "Just because you speak with a Russian accent doesn't mean you're uninformed," one tells the crowd, to huge applause. Then another offers this informed opinion: "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." More applause. Yet another takes the stage and compares criticism of the conference to propaganda in communist Russia, an analogy designed to push the buttons of conference attendees whose families fled the former Soviet Union because of its aggressive atheism.
This is a central irony of the conference and of the Watchmen movement, which has become a force along the West Coast of the United States. The immigrants drawn to the Watchmen are in America because they or their families wanted freedom to practice their religion. Now they are using their newfound freedom to advocate taking away freedoms from gay and lesbian Americans.
It is, unfortunately, an old irony, the oppressed becoming the oppressor—about as old as the phenomenon of hucksters and demagogues preying on the insecurities and frustrations of immigrant groups. Olga Lunina, 20, was born in the Ukraine but followed her family to Washington, where they had come for more liberty. "I just follow everything what Bible say," she told me in the hall outside the conference. "We just want our families and our communities to be safe and protected." Lunina works at an Abercrombie & Fitch in Tacoma and has a hard time dealing with the gay employees, who, she told me, she finds "bossy." She studies surgical technology at Clover Park Technical College. There are good things about America, Lunina concedes, but in the Ukraine, when it comes to homosexuals, "it's not as bad."
She ends our conversation with: "God bless."
Hutcherson is all smiles, wearing a white scarf over a deep-blue silken shirt. He is the only black person at the conference. I ask him whether he has a responsibility to watch his rhetoric. I am thinking of Micah Painter, the gay man who was beaten in the summer of 2004, on gay pride weekend, by three young Russian-speaking evangelical Christians from Bellingham. They attacked Painter while he was leaving a gay bar near Capitol Hill, taunting him, kicking him, and stabbing him with a broken vodka bottle. They were later convicted of a hate crime. At their trial it came out that a young woman who was with them at the time of the attack had explained afterward to a Seattle police detective: "Being gay is against our religion."
Hutcherson bristles when I ask about whether he should watch his language. "I love what you call rhetoric," he says. "Why do I have to watch what I say, which is the truth? And you call it 'rhetoric'?"
Then he takes the stage. A Russian translator conveys his words to a crowd that wouldn't otherwise be able to understand him. "I believe in the word of God 100 percent," Hutcherson begins. After a brief translation, the crowd erupts in cheers, pleased that there are some people in this country who understand them, thrilled that this prominent American has come to tell them what they want to hear, and more confident than ever in the rightness of their interpretation of God's words.
"What we need to take back is the right to disagree," Hutcherson tells the crowd. Still more applause. In the hall before his speech Hutcherson expressed this same idea in more militant terms. "I'm afraid of God's word not being held up and God's word not being lived," he told me. "Why are we fighting? To win God's battle."
