Last Thursday, Referendum 71 went into effect. With that, Washington became the first state in the nation to establish new rights for gay and lesbian couples by a vote of the people. R-71, which passed in November, affirmed legislation passed earlier this year in Olympia, giving registered domestic partners the same legal status as married couples, but without using the "m" word.
Ryan Bubnis
James Eugene Frank
R-71 opponents playing the kid card.
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Though the measure won handily, 47 percent of Washington voters opposed it. Many of them, of course, were from the more-conservative eastern half of the state. But even in largely liberal King County, where you would have been hard-pressed to find anti-71 signs, a third of the votes went against.
Two well-known members of the Puget Sound area's religious right formed the public face of the local opposition: Larry Stickney, head of the Washington Values Alliance, and Ken Hutcherson, a former NFL linebacker and senior pastor at Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland.
But apart from them, opposition to the measure was largely quiet and private. Except among one group: immigrants from Russia and other former Soviet states.
Since 2006, local conservatives have been strengthening ties to the two dozen churches in the Puget Sound area that cater to these immigrant groups. And this year, those congregations became the engine behind the Reject R-71 campaign. The people circulating petitions at area malls to get R-71 onto the ballot, and carrying signs with antigay messages during the campaign, most likely were Russian speakers and relatively new to this country. They weren't the only group opposing the measure, but they seemed the most willing to make their views known and publicly fight the legislation.
To them, the issue isn't just about homosexuality. The bigger fear is that the government will start dictating how they practice their religion, in an echo of the oppression they experienced at the hands of communists.
"I think what makes our Slavic churches stand apart from American churches in terms of participation is the past experience with the government," says Aleksander Naumchik, a home health-care worker and the youth pastor at Light of Hope in Marysville. "Most American churches have no clue about government persecution and dictatorship, but we have gone through that ugliness; we know how it's like to be told that we can't practice our faith." Naumchik, 31, left Ukraine with his family 10 years ago. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, he says, he was harassed, even by schoolteachers, for his faith. The Soviet Union made religious expression illegal, with the sole exception of the Russian Orthodox Church—which wasn't exactly a warm, welcoming community. "The church was like a political party in the Soviet Union," Naumchik says. "It was far away from the Bible."
As it happens, the United States helped set up the clash of ideologies in places like Ukraine. As Oleg Pynda, director of the Ukrainian Community Center in Renton, notes, the late 1800s saw an exodus from Russia to the U.S. After arriving here, those immigrants were converted to various Protestant faiths. Then in the early decades of the 20th century, some of those immigrants returned to Eastern Europe as missionaries. Thousands of people in Pynda's native Ukraine converted to various Protestant denominations, including Pynda himself, who joined the Assembly of God. (He is now an associate pastor at a Ukrainian Pentecostal church housed in the same building as the Center.)
After World War II, when Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova, and other countries bordering Russia found themselves under Soviet rule, the government clamped down on the churches. Resisters were sent to camps in Siberia or mental institutions, says Naumchik. "We were treated like second-class citizens, like black people in the United States."
The policy of religious oppression continued until 1987, when, under Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika policies, Jews and evangelical Christians were allowed to leave the country.
At that time it was still extremely difficult to get into the U.S. In 1989, this country allowed only 16,000 immigrants from the Soviet Union, according to the Washington, D.C.–based Center for Immigration Studies. Attempting to rectify that, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., sponsored legislation in Congress that expanded the definition of religious refugees to include people, from the Soviet Union and other Asian countries, with "a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion."
The Lautenberg Amendment, as it's known, specifically cited Jews and evangelical Christians among those likely to feel such fear. With backing from Moscow, the floodgates opened, and hundreds of thousands of Christians and Jews left the former Soviet Union for the U.S.
Washington state became one of the most popular places to settle, says Cal Uomoto, who runs the Seattle office of World Relief, a Christian nonprofit that is one of the biggest religious-refugee resettlement agencies in the U.S.
The Puget Sound area, in particular, had jobs, Pynda says. In Ukraine, Pynda had been working in a factory that supplied aviation parts. So he picked Seattle because of Boeing. He applied for a job and didn't get it, but he had other family in the area, and later got a job with the Center for MultiCultural Health, which promotes good health in Seattle's minority communities. So he stayed.
