Unite Against Hate’ Conference in Spokane Brings Together Diverse Groups to Combat White Supremacy
News Story by Aaron Hedge | FāVS News
Activists, academics, social workers, community leaders and queer rights advocates gathered in Spokane Friday and Saturday to trade strategies for fighting white supremacy and Christian nationalism, linked movements that are gaining influence in the run-up to the election.
The “Unite Against Hate” conference hosted local, regional and nationally recognized speakers and about 100 attendees from Eastern Washington and North Idaho in a conference room in the Spokane Central Library.
In part, the event sought to bridge gaps between communities that are siloed from each other by hate, for example, Christian and queer spaces.
“I think Jesus would go to Pride more than some of these churches,” said Matt Danielson, the lead Pride organizer in Spokane and panelist at Unite Against Hate.
As event organizers and speakers noted, white supremacy and Christian nationalism have a strong presence in the Inland Northwest. Shawn Keenan, a Coeur d’Alene organizer who founded Love Lives Here and whose family was instrumental in bankrupting the Aryan Nations, said hate and fear are insurgent in the Inland Northwest. He remembered a time when mainstreet businesses in Coeur d’Alene closed to discourage a white supremacist parade.
“To think about that in this time,” Keenan said, “it would be nearly impossible.”
The conference was organized by Coeur d’Alene activist and Idaho state director for the secular advocacy group American Atheists Josiah Mannion.
The event was hosted by American Atheists and sponsored by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the Secular Student Alliance, the Secular Coalition for America, the American Humanist Association and Camp Quest Northwest. Two prominent national critics of Christian nationalism, Andrew Seidel and Bradley Onishi, gave keynote addresses.
Solutions ranged from advocating for people in communities on an interpersonal level to circulating information about bad actors to combat to voting in the election.
How organizing ripples out
Kate Bitz, a program manager with the progressive think tank Western States Center, gave a presentation describing her opposition to a 2023 concert circuit in the Pacific Northwest by the anti-queer worship pastor Sean Feucht.
“This guy really can’t get through a sentence these days before saying something horrifically transphobic,” Bitz said of Feucht. “So we organized faith leaders in three capital cities to respond to Feucht and to say, ‘Here’s who this is. We’re not just going to call him a Christian nationalist.’”
Bitz drafted a statement against the concerts, got the faith leaders from Olympia, Boise and Salem to sign it and distributed it to prominent regional news outlets, including FāVS, which published this story on the statement.
“We reject these attempts to cloak bigotry in religious language, and we ask you to do the same,” the statement said. “This rhetoric is especially dangerous when paired with Sean Feucht’s … willingness to court political violence across our region and the country.”
When Feucht came to Spokane for a concert later that summer, no news organizations were present, but Joseph Peterson, a local man who was alerted to the event partly by Bitz’s organizing and by news coverage of the capital concerts, attended to take pictures.
To the surprise of many in Spokane, he captured images of Feucht and local far right pastor Matt Shea praying over then-Spokane Mayor Nadine Woodward.
The public had not known Woodward would be at the event, and had Peterson not been there, the news may never have gotten out. But his tweets spurred national news coverage, including articles in the The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, and an organic outpouring of dissent from Inland Northwest faith leaders.
“Nadine Woodward had started out saying, ‘I was just at this event to pray for fire victims. … I don’t get the controversy,’” Bitz said.
Woodward later reversed her response and released a “statement in which she called Shea a ‘threat to democracy.’
“In the end, we repudiated her at the polls.”
The next 50 years
During a panel of queer activists and residents, the moderator Sarah Lynch, director of the North Idaho Pride Alliance, asked the audience about their aspirations for the kind of community they want to see in the Inland Northwest in the next half a century.
They said: Open conversations; beauty, joy and love; and an absence of visible hate, such as vandalism of Pride symbols in public and people being openly homophobic.
Chris Morse, a Coeur d’Alene artist, drag queen and photographer, said he hopes the entrenched practice of othering and discriminating against queer people will come to be seen as being on the same level as slavery.
“Slavery is wrong,” he said, reciting what’s come to be held as a bedrock value of advanced democracies. “I hope that’s where we’re at with [hate against] the Rainbow Mafia in 50 years. I hope the community sees it as wrong as [slavery] was, or to see Pride be a focus of history.”
Lynch said a crucial step for people who want to be allies for the queer community is to educate themselves before acting as allies.
“It’s not hard to educate yourself,” Lynch said. “I’m sorry, if I need to explain pronouns to you, you can go online and read about it. I don’t have to.”
Allyship in the workplace
Hate takes shape in personal interactions, out of the blue. One conference speaker, Megan Dardis-Kunz, a social work professor at the University of Idaho, told the story of a friend who wore a shirt with a rainbow and the word “Ally” to her work as a reading paraprofessional in an Idaho school district.
A parent who saw the shirt later emailed the superintendent complaining about the shirt, and the district asked her not to wear it at school, even though it didn’t break any dress codes.
The paraprofessional, Tamara Sine-Kermelis, fought back, telling the district her First Amendment protections and the schools rules preserved her right to wear the shirt.
Sine-Kermelis, who was in the audience at United Against Hate, said she had felt angry about the incident.
“I cried,” she told FāVS News. “I was so mad. … So Megan eventually was like, ‘Tamara, why are you wearing that shirt? I would go back to the policy. It does not violate your dress code policy.’ And so I ended up sending a very long email to my boss saying, ‘You know what, I actually am really bothered by this. And I find it very problematic that some parents can just come in and tell me, you know, what I can wear.’”
Sine-Kermelis had a tattoo of the emblem from her shirt on her right forearm, so she wears it everywhere now.
‘We are not going to get through this without each other’
Gonzaga University philosopher Joan Braune gave a presentation on how to fight fascist movements, which she defined as a set of characteristics rather than an easily identifiable thing. Those characteristics included beliefs like: social hierarchies should enforce differences in stature based on race, gender or ability; conspiracy theories and scapegoating; democracy and reason are bad; and that history unfolds in a cycle of peace and apocalypse, meaning violence must come before socal transformation.
People often think of fascism as existing on the fringes of society, but, Braune said, it is also always connected to power.
“If we picture fascism only as fringe, extreme, radical, on the edge of society,” Braune said, “then we’re going to miss it sometimes when it shows up in a suit and tie, looking very cleaned up, and calls itself a think tank. … Fascism has politicians, has international networks of power, has media outlets, has funding, has weapons. It’s not always recognizable by its weird facial tattoos and biker gangs.”
Bitz touched on this when she showed a photograph of Dave Reilly in a suit at a Coeur d’Alene event. Reilly is a far-right activist who was hired last year by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a rightwing think tank. As journalist Daniel Walters revealed last year, Reilly scolded some of the Nazis who marched in the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for being public with their messaging and told “alt-right gays ‘to stay in the f–ing closet.’”
“This is an example of a white nationalist who’s leveraging Christianity, and in this case Catholicism, to make himself seem more mainstream,” Bitz said.
Those coalitions will only last so long, some panelists said. As an antipode to that, some presenters said, people fighting against white supremacy and Christian nationalism must form lasting coalitions.
“As atheists, we need people of faith, and people of faith need us,” Bitz said. “We need each other’s perspectives. We are not going to get through this without each other.”
