Watchmen on the Walls hate speech instigates murder

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — On the first day of July (2007), Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death.

The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless — two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.


According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them “7-Eleven workers” and “Sodomites.” The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a “good church” like theirs.

According to Singh’s friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh’s party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.


“We don’t want to fight you either,” one of them replied in English. “We just want your faggot friend.”


One of the Slavic men then sucker-punched Singh in the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding. The assailants drove off in a green sedan and red sports car, hurling bottles at Singh’s friends to prevent them from jotting down the license plate. Singh suffered a brain hemorrhage. By the next day, hospital tests confirmed that he was clinically brain dead. His family agreed to remove him from artificial life support July 5.


In recent months, as energetic Russian-speaking “Russian Baptists” and Pentecostals in these states have organized to bring thousands to anti-gay protests, gay rights activists in Sacramento have picketed Slavic anti-gay churches, requested more police patrols in gay neighborhoods and distributed information cards warning gays and lesbians about the hostile Slavic evangelicals who they say have roughed up participants at gay pride events. Singh’s death was the realization of their worst fears.”


Satender Singh’s death appears to be a direct result of the hatred against gays that is being whipped up by Christian extremist groups. SPLC notes one in particular called Watchmen on the Walls, whose co-founder, Scott Lively, authored a book which claimed that gays were responsible for the Holocaust.


On November 19, the FBI released its annual Hate Crime Statistics report for 2006. According to a story on the release by the Washington Post, hate crimes reports were up by 8%. But as the Post has also reported, the reports are pretty spotty because the reporting by local law enforcement agencies is not mandatory. Mississsippi, for example reported no hate crimes at all.

Democrats in Congress have recently taken action to address the problem of hate crimes. H.R. 1592: Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007 was introduced in the House in March, 2007. The bill seeks to offer Federal assistance to local law state and local law enforcement agencies in the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes.


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