Posted on 11/23/2008 9:54:27 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
About 13 Christian young people who had gone to 18th and Castro streets Friday night, November 14, soon had to be escorted out of the neighborhood by police after dozens of angry people confronted and surrounded them.
The Castro has been a gathering spot over the past couple of weekends for people rallying against the passage of Proposition 8, but there apparently hadn’t been any large protests in the neighborhood that night.
Missy Huff, a 21-year-old with Promised Land Fellowship, said she and about 13 other young people gathered at the intersection to play guitar, sing, and worship, something she said they’ve done at other times over the past three years.
Huff said they were singing "Amazing Grace" and "Oh, the Blood of Jesus" and hadn’t said anything when two men - one whom she took to be a member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence - approached them and "started getting pretty upset."
The Sister took out a large, dark green cloth and put it around the young people so people couldn’t see them, said Huff.
Huff said the Sister, who apparently was Timothy Ryan, also known as Sister Mary Timothy, approached another of the group and said things like, "We don’t need to be saved. How dare you come out here."
Ryan told the Bay Area Reporter in an e-mail what he said was, "Do you have absolutely no respect for our community? Why tonight and why in front of [Hank Wilson’s] altar? Why is it always the Castro? We do not need to be saved and we are not a ’broken’ community!"
Wilson was a longtime gay and AIDS activist who died November 9. Friends had set up the altar after his death last week.
Ryan, who helped alert others to the group’s presence in the neighborhood, wrote that he and his husband, Michael Medema, took his sari, "as we have done when they’ve come before, and shielded the community from their hate dressed in ’Love.’"
Huff said Medema was telling people the young people were there regarding Prop 8, which Huff said wasn’t the case. Angry people started gathering around them, Huff said, and yelling and screaming. She said there was eventually a mob of about 200 people screaming "Shame on you!" and "Go home to where you came from!"
Police said about 50 people had surrounded the group.
Huff said the cloth was still wrapped around them when a man she couldn’t see dumped hot coffee on the faces of her and another woman.
"It was pretty scary," she said.
Ryan wrote that Medema eventually removed the sari from around the young people.
Then, Huff said an unidentified man picked up one of the group’s Bibles and started walking away with it. Huff said she and her team were holding hands in a circle and continuing to sing "Amazing Grace" when Christine Cloud, 21, stepped out of the circle and asked the man to please return the Bible.
The man hit Cloud over the head with the Bible, shoved her to the ground, and started kicking her legs, Huff said. A couple people from the crowd pulled the man off Cloud, she said.
Cloud said, "I was really scared" when the man attacked her. "I just didn’t want things to get worse ... I was afraid he was going to go crazy." She said she felt safe after the man was pulled off of her.
Huff said a police officer grabbed the man and asked Cloud if she wanted to press charges, but she declined. The officer let the man go and told him not to come back that night, said Huff.
Ryan said he did see a woman, probably Cloud, get knocked down (though Ryan met Cloud at a Promised Land service the next morning and thought her first name was Caitlin) and that he and Medema pulled the man off of her "and tried to reassure her that we were angry, but that violence was not the way." Ryan said Medema was also the person who turned the man over to the police.
The young people stayed in a circle singing while "tons of people," many of them coming out of bars, shoved the group and continued yelling things, Huff said. She said one man threatened their team leader, saying, "I’m gonna kill you."
Huff said a police officer confronted the man. At this point, she said, people surrounding the group had gotten whistles and were getting as close to them and as loud as they could, but the group kept singing.
One of the men in her group had called police, Huff said, and 15 to 20 officers arrived wearing riot gear.
Around that time, she said, people in the crowd started assaulting the men in the Christian group, trying to pull their pants dawn and grabbing them inappropriately. The men put the women in the middle of the group to protect them, said Huff.
The police made a line between the Christian group and the crowd while people continued to scream and yell, Huff said, and at least one officer told the group the police feared for the young people’s safety, and they would need to escort them out.
However, Ryan wrote that he was there the whole time, and he didn’t see any of what Huff described happening to the men. Ryan wrote that police came within two to three minutes after he got there, and more came as time went on. Eventually, there were 15 to 20 officers who quickly made a barricade between the two groups, Ryan wrote.
Ryan wrote he was "pretty damn sure" the police would have stopped the alleged assault on the men. The police continually asked the crowd to keep a few feet between themselves and the young people, and the police intervened every time someone got too close to them, he wrote.
"This is just them trying to slander what happened and to make us look like a bunch of perverts instead of a group of angry, pissed off queers," wrote Ryan.
Huff said by 8:30 the officers surrounded her team and escorted them to their van, which was parked at 20th and Eureka streets, as a crowd followed them.
Huff confirmed a report that the young people had covered the van’s license plate, but she said they hadn’t done that until after they got back to the vehicle.
Asked if they’d had any idea something like this could happen, Huff said her group had "considered it would be a little more intense than normal" and that’s why they had decided just to sing, rather than approach people as they would normally do.
But "we didn’t think anything like this would happen," Huff said.
Huff, who acknowledged people being upset about the passage of Prop 8, told the B.A.R. in an October interview that she’d been fasting and praying for the measure to pass, which it later did by a 52 percent majority.
Cloud said she didn’t press charges against the man who allegedly attacked her "because I wanted to forgive him." She said she got a knot on her head and a bruise on her leg, but it was "nothing very serious at all."
Huff said she believes her group will return to the Castro at some point.
"We understand that not everyone in the LGBT community is violent and angry" like the people they encountered Friday night, said Huff.
"We go to the Castro all the time," she said. "We have friends there. We love the people who live in the Castro, and in no way hold what happened Friday night against them."
Eric Smith, 51, who lives near where the group’s van was parked, said he witnessed a portion of the incident. Smith said people were shouting things like "Get out of our neighborhood!" and he saw a crowd - still blowing whistles - follow as police escorted the young people to their van. Once they got there, he said the police stopped the crowd.
"I understand the anger," Smith said. "I understand the disappointment of the loss that we experienced, but it’s how we channel our energy and our anger in constructive ways that I really think should be on the table for discussion."
Sergeant Wilfred Williams, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, said no arrests were made. Williams said there were about 50 people around the young people, and that he hadn’t heard about the hot coffee or any injuries. A call to Mission Station Captain Steve Tacchini was not returned.
A video of group being escorted out of the neighborhood is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrRxFoBSPng.
Sounds like at least 3 or 4 incidents in this story should have resulted arrests for assault on the part of the gays, and yet it’s the Christians who were forced to give up their Constitutional right to stand on a public sidewalk.
Wow .... stuff like this never happens in Texas. I wonder why?
guns.
What did those Christians think was going to happen? The time for turning the other cheek passed a long time ago. As a Christian I believe in the Templar method of demonstrating.
I happen to know that most churches here in the South (including Texas) have armed security, whether paid, volunteer or the ushers/clergy, themselves.
> What did those Christians think was going to happen? The time for turning the other cheek passed a long time ago. As a Christian I believe in the Templar method of demonstrating.
(big grin!) Please explain...
Sounds spookily like Sodom and Gommoreh just before Lot left town...
This is getting out of hand...
But I'm sure no one got charged with this sexual assault.
No. You guys have done a great job of that on your own.
Quite a distinction....
“Get out of our neighborhood!”
“Go home to where you came from!”
My sentiments exactly!
Having been born in San Francisco, and being a true San Francisco native, I would like to say this to all of the fags & queers who have invaded MY hometown over the years, 99% of whom were NOT born in San Francisco!
That’s what I was thinking!
“Sounds spookily like Sodom and Gommoreh just before Lot left town...”
Watch the video of the incident, it is eerie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrRxFoBSPng
These are more dangerous than Smallpox and/or
Tuberculosis, for which victims are quarantined.
Surprisingly, Leprosy, which is far, far less dangerous
and contagious than HIV & AIDS, required banishment until
recently.
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