Race for '08: Edwards' wife says local homicide illustrates danger of hate speech

Elizabeth Edwards said Saturday she is troubled by the suspected anti-gay beating death of a Sacramento man, and said the killing of Satender Singh demands renewed condemnations of hate speech in America.

Singh, a 26-year-old Fijian immigrant, died four days after he was attacked July 1 at Lake Natoma by an angry group hurling explicit gay slurs and racial remarks.

Edwards, campaigning in Sacramento for her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards of North Carolina, said she was so affected by news of Singh's death that she rewrote a speech on human rights she was due to deliver later Saturday in San Francisco.

"I thought we learned some lessons from Laramie and Matthew Shepard," Edwards said in an interview, referring to the fatal 1998 beating of a gay college student in Wyoming that triggered an uproar over anti-gay violence.

Edwards brought up Singh's death in a meeting with reporters after delivering a speech in Sacramento to the California State Democratic Party executive committee.

In a follow-up interview, she said his killing showed that the lessons of Shepard's murder still go unlearned as long as "tensions between certain communities" fail to "stop short of violence."

In Sacramento, Singh's death was portrayed as a symbol of long-festering wounds between the region's gay and Slavic evangelical community -- a vocal force in denouncing gay rights.

Singh died after a Slavic group confronted him and his friends, apparently after he was seen hugging and dancing with other men. Taunted and then punched in the face, he fell over and cracked his skull.

Edwards, a champion to gay rights activists through her public support for gay marriage and appearances at gay pride events, was due to speak Saturday night at the 2007 Human Rights Campaign dinner in San Francisco.

Edwards' views on gay marriage differ from those of her husband, who supports legal civil unions for gays -- but not marriage.

Contrasting their different orientations on the subject, Edwards said: "I come from a background where I moved around a lot. I lived nine years in Japan. I saw people of different religions. I saw people of different lifestyles, and I think it was an easier journey for me because of that.

"John was brought up in the pews of Southern Baptist churches, and it's a more difficult path for him to take."

But she said her husband doesn't believe that "government should be in the business of telling churches which relationships they can bless with marriage sacraments."

"That's the churches' role," she said. "Government has no business telling them."

She said in an interview that Singh's death showed that "our tolerance for words of hatred is actually turning out to be a permission slip to take the next step."

"The first step of hatred that is played out in violence is played out in words," she said.

Edwards recently called in to a political talk show to take on firebrand conservative author Ann Coulter. She asked Coulter to stop a pattern of personal attacks -- including an anti-gay slur against her husband -- that diminish our "political dialogue precisely at the time that we need to raise it."

She said Saturday that hate speech is also being fueled by the continuing debate over gay marriage.

"I think we have undue fear about gay marriage," Edwards told reporters. " ... I've heard more than one speech about how gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. It's complete nonsense, in my view."

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• The Bee's Peter Hecht can be reached at (916) 326-5539 or phecht@sacbee.com.