The Sac Rag

I’m wondering what other people think about the Bee’s stirring article yesterday on “wounds that have festered for some time between Sacramento’s gay community and members of the Slavic evangelical community,” brought to clearer light by the beating death on July 1 of Satender Singh at Lake Natoma.

But I think it’s irresponsible for the Bee to make the jump that the attackers are part of that church. The tragedy of Satender Singh’s death is a reality. The danger represented by the tensions between the gay community and anti-gay Slavic Christians is a reality. But the lone thread connecting those two stories is that the attackers spoke Russian.

One need only read the comments on the Bee’s article to see how quickly readers picked up on the Bee’s assumption that these attackers were motivated in any way by their church. Some commenters go so far as to advocate closing the nation’s borders to prevent entry by “these people.” The only reason such commenters think this has anything to do with Christians is because the Bee made that assumption.

I feel like this might only inflame those tensions by putting it in the minds of readers that all Russian-speaking Sacramentans are necessarily bigots. If it’s true that those bastards, when they are caught, were influenced by the church’s rhetoric, then we have a problem. But until that is known, isn’t it irresponsible to cast the net as wide as the Bee has done?