100,000 slavics use first amendment rights

[Tock]

100,000 slavics (Legal immigrants) used their first amendment rights to speak out at Gay rallies and school board meetings. They say that they have no problem with what goes on in someone's bedroom, but they will sit by as their children are force-fed the gay propaganda. "Gays have a right to protest in favor of the gay agenda, and we have the right to protest against the gay agenda."
Sacramento Bee newspaper
http://dwb.sacbee.com/content/news/s...15116920c.html
cut-n-paste
This is obviously being spun as hate speech, but the first amendment protects their right to protest regardless as no one group should expect a pass from those who oppose their agenda.

Well, I Googled but couldn't find anything about 100000 slavic protesting at gay rallies and school board meetings. Once again, it seems that Logan has heard one thing, but understood it to be something else.

There has been some controversy over a bill that would require school textbooks to include a mention about the history of gays and lesbians.

From http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&sn=002&sc=594

State law now requires that "men, women, black Americans, American Indians, Mexicans, Asians, Pacific Island people and other ethnic groups" be included in textbook descriptions of "the economic, political and social development of California and the United States of America, with particular emphasis on portraying the role of these groups in contemporary society."

"This is simply adding the LGBT community to the groups that the state has said must be included in the curriculum," said Geoffrey Kors, executive director of Equality California, which backs the bill. "There's nothing special or different.

Seems to me that if the government is going to include mention about all those other groups, there's no reason to exclude gays and lesbians, especially since there is a problem with gay-bashing. Of course, some folks just don't like queers, and don't want their children to hear anything about them from anyone.

Well, seems to me that they're gonna have to either mention all the minority groups, or none of them. Whichever way they want to go is fine by me.
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Oh, by the way, I did some more Googling, and it turns out that the California Governor (Arnold) vetoed that bill about a month ago. Ya, the California Senate and House amended it so that only age-appropriate information would be presented to the kids. But I guess Arnold figured signing that bill into law wouldn't help his re-election bid . . .
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-Tock

entire article follows:

CALIFORNIA
Bill would include gays in public school texts
Plan will reignite debate over who controls curricula
Wyatt Buchanan, Greg Lucas, Chronicle Staff Writers

Sunday, April 16, 2006

A proposal to require California public school textbooks to include gay and lesbian history is a top priority of the Legislature's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Caucus, but opponents say it would indoctrinate students.

The bill is garnering national attention because California makes up roughly 12 percent of the nation's textbook market, though major publishers said they produce national editions for other states so the law won't force kids elsewhere to learn about Harvey Milk or gay pride.

Sponsored by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, the bill is to come before the full state Senate as soon as Monday, when it also will rekindle a long-running debate over whether state officials or California's 1,053 local school boards should choose curricula.

Another Kuehl bill, which became law in 2000, prohibits schools from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Kuehl was out of the country last week and unavailable for comment.

State law now requires that "men, women, black Americans, American Indians, Mexicans, Asians, Pacific Island people and other ethnic groups" be included in textbook descriptions of "the economic, political and social development of California and the United States of America, with particular emphasis on portraying the role of these groups in contemporary society."

"This is simply adding the LGBT community to the groups that the state has said must be included in the curriculum," said Geoffrey Kors, executive director of Equality California, which backs the bill. "There's nothing special or different.

"All students will benefit from a curriculum that's inclusive and diverse," he said. "The goal is to have students, when they learn about history, to learn about all the history and not have one group excluded. No one benefits from erasing an entire group from the history of the nation and the world."

Opponents of the bill, including major conservative religious political groups, have said the bill will require children to become supporters of gay rights.

"This is about pushing a blatant sexual agenda -- including sex changes that involve cutting off body parts -- upon impressionable schoolchildren as young as kindergarten," said Randy Thomasson, who heads the Campaign for Children and Families.

Thomasson said teaching about racial differences is not like teaching about sexual orientation because, he believes, people can change their sexual orientation. He said the bill "will require the positive portrayal of these lifestyles, with the goal of forcing students to accept them and even consider themselves eligible to engage in them."

Californians contacting the Traditional Values Coalition about the bill are outraged, said Benjamin Lopez, legislative analyst and lobbyist for that organization, which is focusing on six Democratic senators viewed as swing votes on the bill.

"We're seeing the same level of concern, objection and interest as we did with (San Francisco Assemblyman) Mark Leno's gay marriage bill," Lopez said.

The California Family Council cast the bill as "indoctrinating children with a pro-homosexual viewpoint," in its e-mail newsletter this week.

The California School Boards Association, which hasn't taken a position, generally favors vesting more decision-making authority in local boards rather than the state.

"It should be a local-level decision as to what information is appropriate," said Erika Hoffman, the association's senior lobbyist.

The state of Texas recently required health textbooks that used gender-neutral terms for marriage partners to be edited to specify man-woman relationships, said Stephen Driesler, executive director of the school division for the Association of American Publishers.

In California's education standards, gay issues are mentioned only in regard to health education and in a more clinical than cultural context.

Researchers at San Francisco State University studying gay youth and their families have found that not teaching about gays and lesbians affects adolescent development.

"It's very important for self-esteem and for (gay youth) feeling their lives matter and are important," said Caitlin Ryan, who leads the Family Acceptance Project at the school's César E. Chávez Institute.

An American Academy of Pediatrics policy states that environments critical of gay people interfere with the development of gay youth. And a 2003 Preventing School Harassment Study by the California Safe Schools Coalition found that school climate improves and students feel safer and experience less name-calling and other harassment at schools where gay and lesbian issues are taught.

The state adopts new standards for kindergarten through grade 8 in the four core subject matters -- history, math, science and English -- every six years. The state has just completed history and is revising science standards this year. English is set for review in 2008.

Maureen DiMarco, senior vice president for education policy and government affairs at Houghton Mifflin publishing, said states that did not want students to learn about gay and lesbian history and social contributions would not have to include it in their textbooks.

"With controversial curriculum -- and unfortunately gays and lesbians are controversial in a lot of states -- whether that would be included would be determined by each state," she said.

Some California districts, like Berkeley Unified, already discuss gay issues.

"Yes, we discuss that in high schools and middle and elementary schools as well," said Mark Coplan, a district spokesman. "Divorce, divided families, how family situations change. We deal with all of it."

[Logan13]

For some reason, that article in the Bee is no longer available, so here is the one from the LA Times posted below. Tock may not like the fact that other Americans have the gual to oppose his agenda in public but the fact is that they have as much right to free speech as the gay agenda does. Perhaps Tock's idea of free speech is only speech that falls in line with his own ideals. Sorry Tock, but everyone can exercise their first amendment rights, not just ultra-liberal homosexuals.........
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la...home-headlines

For Gays, a Loud New Foe
Sacramento's large enclave of immigrant Slavic evangelicals is becoming a force on social issues. Their actions shock many.
By Rone Tempest, Times Staff Writer
October 13, 2006
SACRAMENTO — Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival were prepared for trouble.

The Q Crew, a local "queer/straight alliance," distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground's cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol. Jerry Sloan manned a table for Stand Up for Sacramento, a recently formed gay self-defense organization.

"So far, so good," he said. "No Russians."

The festival, held last month amid the gay bars, restaurants and shops of midtown's "Lavender Heights" neighborhood, went off without conflict. But the elaborate security preparations reflected growing tensions between Sacramento gays and the city's large and vociferous community of fundamentalist Christians from the former Soviet Union.

Over the last 18 months, Sacramento Russian-language church members have picketed gay pride events, jammed into legislative committee meetings when gay issues were on the agenda and demonstrated at school board meetings.

Incited by firebrand Russian Pentacostal pastors and polemical Russian-language newspapers, the fundamentalists turn out en masse for state Capitol protest rallies.

Last June, urging readers to attend a massive rally, the Russian newspaper the Speaker told them:

"Make a choice. It's your decision. Homosexuality is knocking on your doors and asking: 'Can I make your son gay and your daughter lesbian?' "

In most instances, the Russian-speaking demonstrators far outnumber representatives from all other anti-gay groups combined. Anti-homosexual rallies that a few years ago attracted a few dozen participants now regularly draw hundreds and sometimes thousands, many with a heavy Russian accent.

Even in a state capital where impassioned public demonstrations are a daily event, the Slavic fundamentalists stand out. Elderly women in babushkas stand next to small children carrying signs stating: "Perversion is Never Safe" and "I Am Not Learning About Gay People."

Speakers address the crowds fervently in Russian and Ukrainian.

After a wave of religious refugees that began coming here in the late 1980s, Sacramento now has one of the largest Russian-speaking populations in North America: an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Slavic immigrants, community members say. They came primarily from the Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus and the other southern Soviet republics, and settled mostly in Sacramento's northern and western suburbs.

These immigrants are different from their Russian-speaking counterparts in New York's Brighton Beach, San Francisco's Richmond district or West Hollywood, all established Russian-immigrant enclaves that are mostly Jewish or Russian Orthodox and generally coexist with large gay populations.

West Hollywood's 11-member Russian Advisory Board recently voted 8 to 3 to send a letter to Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzkov, asking him to reconsider his decision banning gay pride events in the Russian capital.

"We want you to consider the unique partnership that has developed here in West Hollywood between the large population of Russian-speaking immigrants and the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community," the letter said.

The Sacramento community, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly evangelical — Baptist and Pentecostalist. The charismatic Pentacostal church, introduced in the Ukraine in the 1920s by missionary and martyr Ivan Efimovich Vornaev, includes speaking in tongues and washing of feet. The churches' social views are based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

"The main issues in the Russian community here," said Vitaly Prokopchuk, a Sacramento County sheriff's deputy, "are gay issues, abortion issues and family-definition issues. To these people, these issues are very cut-and-dry in the Bible."

Sacramento has more than 70 Russian fundamentalist congregations. One of them, Bethany Missionary Slavic Church, has 3,200 members and claims to be the largest Russian-language church outside of Europe.

"Sacramento is the No. 1 gathering place for non-Jewish, non-Russian Orthodox, fundamentalist Russian and Ukrainian immigrants," said University of Oregon geographer Susan W. Hardwick, an expert on the Russian immigrant community. Similar but smaller communities, Hardwick said, have established themselves in Portland and Seattle, where they also are beginning to flex their political muscle.

But nowhere approaches Sacramento, which has a 24-hour Russian-language cable television station, two radio stations and several newspapers, all of which push a conservative message marked by strident opposition to homosexuality. A recent edition of the Speaker, for example, promoted a book, "The Pink Swastika," that contends that the extermination of Jews during World War II was the work of homosexuals inside the Nazi Party.

For Sacramento gay leaders, the sudden appearance of organized demonstrators was a major shock after years of building support in the state capital.

"We've been accepted and were just perking along," said Sloan, a 69-year-old church pastor and co-founder of Lam**a Community Center, which serves the gay community. "That's why this Russian thing was such a jolt to people."

Leaders of the religious right, however, celebrate the Russian efforts as a revival.

"My hope and my prayer," said Mark Matta, a former legislative aide who heads the Christian Public Awareness Ministries, "is that they will become a voice in the wilderness for the rest of the country."

Many credit the Slavic Christian immigrant community with filling a void left by the traditional American church and providing reinforcements in the ongoing culture wars over what should define family, acceptable sexual relationships and marriage.

"Russian Christians bring a fresh faith and uncorrupted family values to this country. They are a shining model for the rest of us in terms of faith, family, work ethic, patriotism and community," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families.

Gay civil rights activists, meanwhile, accuse the demonstrators of hateful and aggressive tactics that they say sometimes lean dangerously toward violence.

Signs displayed by the demonstrators often equate homosexuality with pedophilia and describe the AIDS epidemic as a message from God. One of the common tactics of the demonstrators is to tap gays forcefully on the head and announce that they have been "saved."

"They've declared war on us for some reason," said Stand Up for Sacramento founder Nathan Feldman, a jewelry store clerk. "They got it into their heads that California is the land of sin and that it is their duty to cleanse the state, starting with homosexuals."

Feldman said he formed his self-defense organization after he was surrounded by dozens of Russian-speaking demonstrators at a June gay pride parade.

"I ended up getting spit on and yelled at," said Feldman, whose organization recently staged a counterdemonstration outside Bethany Slavic Missionary Church.

Prokopchuk, the Sacramento County sheriff's deputy, is for many here the voice of law and order in the Russian-Ukrainian community. A garrulous bear of a man with a burr haircut, he appears regularly on local Russian television and radio. His cellphone constantly rings with calls asking him to interpret and explain American laws and responsibilities.

Like many here, Prokopchuk, 32, arrived with his family 16 years ago from his native Ukraine after Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev loosened emigration rules for religious refugees who faced persecution under the Communist regime.

Before emigrating, many of the refugees learned about Sacramento from two sources: a short-wave fundamentalist religious radio program, "Word to Russia," that originated here, and a Russian-language newspaper, Our Days, that was printed in Sacramento and distributed to underground churches in the Soviet Union. A local Russian Baptist church persuaded several Sacramento evangelical churches to sponsor the refugees.

Prokopchuk attributes the recent political activities in Sacramento to culture shock and anti-homosexual prejudices imported from the home country.

"Back home," Prokopchuk said, "homosexuality was looked at as kind of a disgrace and a lifestyle for immoral people and prisoners. I came from a town of 30,000 people but did not know even one openly gay person."

But an even bigger factor, Prokopchuk said, is the widespread fear in the Russian-Ukrainian community that the American popular culture will capture their children.

"It's not only about homosexuality. It's also about drinking, about premarital sex and about drugs," Prokopchuk said. "Some of these people even regret coming here because they have a feeling they are losing their kids."

At a shopping center in suburban Antelope outside Sacramento, young Russians and Ukrainians skateboard in the parking lot and gather on the outdoor patio of a Starbucks.

Across the lot, Natasha Bugriyev, 31, watches warily from the counter of her Russian vitamin shop.

Compared to many immigrants, Bugriyev and her husband, a building contractor, have been quite successful since coming to Sacramento from their native Moldova 12 years ago.

The couple, active members of a Russian Baptist church, live in a 4,500-square-foot home in Roseville, an affluent Sacramento suburb. She drives a new BMW 745. He has a new Nissan Titan pickup truck.

Recently, however, they have been considering moving back to Moldova.

"Honestly, I'm scared for the kids," Bugriyev said. "We have a 5-year-old and a 1-year-old. I'm scared that when they go to school they will be in a class where they are taught it is OK for a man to sleep with another man. We are thinking that after another five years, we will move back to Moldova."

Michael Lokteff, 69, is a former high school teacher who was the voice of the "Word to Russia" broadcasts into the Soviet Union. A cheerful, white-haired lay Baptist who takes a glass of wine with his meals, Lokteff said that many of the immigrants were unprepared for culturally laissez-faire California.

In part, Lokteff blames his own broadcasts, which he said left the listeners with the impression that America, and particularly Sacramento, was a Christian bastion.

"They even thought my program was government-sponsored," Lokteff said. "They came here expecting a Christian commune, and all of a sudden the first thing they see is a gay parade."

Like the Calvinist Puritans who were the first to settle in the New World, many in the Slavic religious community have an apocalyptic worldview. To them, the United States is a chosen nation but the American church is apostate and hapless, not up to the job. The Slavic Christians view it as their duty to cleanse and save the nation in preparation for Jesus Christ's return to Earth.

"We feel the American church already lost the battle 20 years ago by remaining silent," said Victor Chernyetsky, 47, a Soviet-trained engineer who serves as administrator for the Bethany Slavic Missionary Church. "We can't remain silent. There are a lot of sins."

One of the first Slavic immigrants to jump into politics was Galina Bondar, an energetic 39-year-old registered nurse from Ukraine whose father is a leading fundamentalist pastor.

Bondar said she was inspired by a radio interview with conservative activist Randy Thomasson, who took her under his wing and taught her the rules of engagement in Sacramento. "He was the first one who taught me the civil process, Political Science 101," Bondar said.

In 1997, Bondar started her own weekly Russian-language radio program, "Heal Our Land," which tracks legislation of interest to the Russian church. She began speaking at Sacramento Russian Baptist and Pentacostal churches, urging political action.

Bondar, as much as anyone, was responsible for organizing and directing public protests, including a raucous 2005 appearance at a legislative hearing on gay marriage that marked the political coming-out of the Slavic community.

"We hate government oppression of religious freedom and family values, whether in Russia or California," Bondar said. "We just have more we can do about it in California."

Taking her movement to a new level, Bondar was one of three people in the Russian-language community to file as a candidate for a suburban school board.

On Sept. 5, the day after the Sacramento Rainbow Festival, several hundred sign-wielding demonstrators appeared at the Capitol to oppose a state Senate bill, SB 1437, that would have banned negative references based on sexual orientation from state textbooks and classes.

In the crowd were Bondar's mother, father and grandmother.

The next day, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill, stating that protection against discrimination already existed in state law.

"We may not have gotten the veto without them," said Thomasson, who spearheaded the lobbying effort against the bill.

To Bondar, the veto was a clear victory.

"Very satisfying," she said. "It shows people who participated in the civic process that their hard work was not in vain."

-Logan13