This is one of the good ones.
Marcos Breton’s Metro column today features his take on the search for the men responsible for the murder of Satender Singh a month ago. Once again it’s important for me to state that those people need to be caught and punished, and that Singh’s death is a real tragedy.
Breton takes Sacramento to task for being the kind of place where culprits don’t walk into the police station and turn themselves in routinely. He also brings up the “unwanted attention” this case brings on the area’s “Slavic community.” Although he acknowledges that only “some members” of that community belong to Evangelical churches who have engaged in anti-gay protests, he goes right on ahead and assumes that the attackers should turn themselves in because “[a]ttacking a man, causing his death and then hiding from the law is the opposite of Christian principles.” He’s obviously read his stuff, this Marcos Breton.
Here’s my favorite part:
Now, Sgt. Tim Curran, a spokesman for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, confirms that the suspects linked to Singh’s killing are from the Slavic community.
Curran said some members of that community have been helpful to the investigation — but the people suspected of being involved have not.
You know, some planes fly to their destinations without incident — but the few that have malfunctions midair and plummet from the sky do not. Some bees fly past me without stinging — but the ones who stop and insert their stinger into my skin do not.
Let’s get this straight, because maybe I’m completely wrong. Does “Slavic community” mean people from the former USSR and neighboring countries? Or does it mean “members of Slavic Evangelical churches”?
Also not helping promote tolerance: last week’s News & Review guest op-ed titled “What’s with the Russians?”
The Sac Rag 
i think what he means by those “suspected” are those that were with the man who threw the punch…the people with actual information that could lead to arrests and closure in this case. and i don’t believe they are evangelical…i believe it is mostly baptist and episcopalian according to an article that i can seem to source this moment. any way you cut it it’s religious dogma and ferver that causes people to act this way, not where they are from. As my hero Christopher Hitchens writes, religion poisons everything.
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TP I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or serious. Because one might also say that atheism poisons, as anyone glossing over any article about the Khmer Rouge can attest. As I’ve noted before on this site, we don’t know what kind of dogma, if any, caused these people to act this way because they haven’t been identified and investigated. Surely hatred had something to do with it. If that hatred sprouted from religious dogma there is obviously a terrible problem either with the dogma or its interpretation. But it is prejudiced and irrational to jump from that speculation to the statement that “all religion” is poisonous. It certainly doesn’t breed tolerance or anything close to it, which is especially sad in this particular situation.
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TP, Hitchens is one of my heroes too, and his intellect needs to be bottled up or it could destroy a large city, but if he said that he wasn’t using his noggin. And now I must go into hiding lest his intellect found out I said that and seek to rearrange my atoms…
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Answer: sarcastic. my son kept me up so i’m a little sleepy this afternoon and my point was washed away in a haze of doodlebops. You are absolutely right. Whether or not the offenders here were members of a church we will find out and go from there. we don’t know anything except that we have a growing problem with violence and hate in this city from the singh tragity to the recent arsons and swastika paintings and it seams to be escalating.
and DMZ: there is a collection of Hitchens’ essays called “Love, Poverty, and War” with a piece that makes Mother Theresa look like an evil witch…so yeah, he’s good.
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Well TP there’s absolutely no room for sarcasm here. Hope you get some better rest tonight. 🙂
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Follow up to this case:
And, of course, the comments are classy.
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One of the many reasons I think prosecuting “hate crimes” is a waste of judicial resources and at times an infringement on free expression. Presumably the evidence of a discriminatory or hateful motivation tends to be statements, associations, etc. of the defendant, which I don’t think should be criminalized. If you murder someone you should be punished regardless of your motivations but if you don’t hurt anyone you should be able to hate whoever you want. I’m not saying I’ll agree with you, or that it’s morally right, just that it’s not for the criminal justice system to regulate. That you killed someone because you have hatred in your heart, or a certain brand of hatred, is really not something for a jury to determine in my opinion.
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Also I assume the Bee flubbed a bit… “hate crimes charge that accused Shevchenko of starting a fight with Satender Singh because he believed Singh was gay”? Surely the hate crime charge alleged that Shevchenko accidentally killed Singh, not just that he started a fight…
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Shevchenko was facing a hate crime allegation that was “attached” to a disturbing the peace and simple assault charges. He was not the one who threw the fatal punch.
Click to access COI_Shevenko.pdf
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Hmmm, so basically your point is that I am an idiot for not reading the Bee article or looking up the names? I respectfully agree.
I’ll default back to HeyMeg’s argument.
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no…the point is…foreign names are hard to remember!
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