City asks church petition crowd to move along, gets backlash on talk radio

It began as a neighborhood complaint about too many people in a parking lot.

By the time it was over, it had involved the mayor, the police chief, and a state representative and had blossomed into a cause celebré on conservative talk radio.

The people in the parking lot of St. Nicholas Catholic Church on April 28 were collecting petitions in support of Proposition 90, which would repeal a newly passed state law mandating age-appropriate K-12 sex education in public schools.

Neither the mayor nor the police chief knew that, though, when they got an irate complaint from a neighbor about the crowd of people apparently violating social-distancing rules.

“There was a large crowd of people, and they had a tent and music and were barbecuing,” said the neighbor, Allison Kytle. “If my nephew can’t get married because of the coronavirus situation, how are these people allowed to gather in large groups?”

Another neighbor, Jeannette Bowers, said she counted “twenty or thirty” people gathered around two tent-pavilions.

“I thought at first it was a funeral, there was so many people coming and going,” she said. Nobody was wearing masks. There were so many cars. It was quite an event.”

She sent smartphone pictures of the gathering to Kytle, who forwarded them to city hall.

Police Chief, Kelly Busey emailed the St. Nicholas pastor, Father Mark Guzman, asking him — but not demanding, the chief insists — to break up the gathering for health reasons.

“My email basically said, ‘We strongly advise against having gatherings of this type, because of the coronavirus risk, and would you consider calling it off,’ ” Busey said. “I got an email back from an associate pastor who said, ‘Oh, yes, it was people from our congregation, and we’ll go ahead and cease.”

Later, Busey provided The Gateway a copy of his email. It read:

“I am just reaching out to you to see if you know anything about this gathering and to see if it was in any way connected to a St Nicholas event. The goal is just to encourage whomever held the event to refrain from doing this during the Stay Home Stay Healthy order from the Governor.”

Felt intimidated

But the sponsors of the petition drive, who included Garth Jackson, a onetime school board candidate, felt intimidated.

“What they said is, ‘We strongly discourage you from doing this,’ “ said Jackson. “Well, that’s pretty much the same as saying, ‘Don’t do it.’ We felt pushed around. The church was not prepared to stand up to the police.”

The petitioners called in an ally, state Rep. Jesse Young, a Gig Harbor Republican.

Young found them a new spot at his own church, Harbor Fellowship, which is just outside the city limits. Then he went on a Seattle talk radio station to accuse the chief and the mayor of “bullying” the group into shutting down.

“I talked to a lot of people who had been there, and, yes, they felt bullied,” Young told The Gateway on Monday. “I felt I had to stand up for my constituents.”

Someone called Mayor Kit Kuhn about it, and recorded him using the words “told them they had to stop,” which the talk show host played, dramatically, as a smoking gun.

During an on-air grilling by KTTH host Todd Herman, Kuhn insisted repeatedly that no one had ordered the gathering to stop.

“I did not order it shut down,” Kuhn told The Gateway on Friday. “I had the chief check into it it, and he told them in an email that we ‘encourage them to refrain from gathering at close distances.’ This is not a must but an ask.”

“We told them we would not be shutting them down, and I even called the lady that organized it and told her directly, that we are not doing anything about it.”

Instead, he said. the church voluntarily complied and asked the group to leave.

Young calls Kuhn’s explanation “bullcrap.”

“Why would all these constituents reach out to me if they hadn’t been told to shut down?” he asked. “I feel they are calling my constituents liars.”

Young maintains that Kuhn told him directly, a phone conversion, that he had ordered the activity “shut down,” using those words.

The St. Nicholas pastoral associate for communication, Luc-Ricardo Fils, said “We have no comment on the matter. And will no longer comment on it anymore.”

‘Zero right answers’

“This has been so overblown, I can’t believe it,” said Busey. “We had no idea it was petition gathering, or even what it was about. Apparently people got all fired up and called up Jesse Young, and he started flapping his gums about ‘bullying,’ which is the last thing we were trying to do.”

Police are in a dilemma in these situation, the chief said.

“There are zero right answers, and the cops are right in the middle of it,” Busey said. “We get calls from people saying we should send officers into the stores to enforce the six-foot rule. Then there are people who say, ‘Hey, your officers looked at us funny while we were playing basketball.’ You can’t win.”

The sex-education bill to which the petition gatherers object, Senate Bill 5395, was passed into law on March 10 and signed by Gov. Jay Inslee two weeks later. It was generally opposed by Republicans and supported by Democrats.

The law says every public school district must offer “comprehensive sex education” for all grades by 2022 and for grades 6-12 by next year. It allows parents to opt out their children for religious or other reasons.

Opponents, led by an organization called Parents for Safe Schools, are particularly disturbed by the inclusion of kindergarten, which they consider too young for the subject matter; although the proposed curriculum for that age concentrates on safety issues and doesn’t contain any sexual instruction.

“The law that the passed has a nice shell around the outside — teach kids how to say no, and about ‘stranger danger’ and all that,” said Jackson, 68, who is a retired Gig Harbor High School math teacher. But it also includes what he considers insidious ideas, like ‘gender is your own choice,’ and ‘finding pleasure.’

Some conservative groups have called it “pornography,” and referred to it as “SeXXX education” or “the perverse sex-ed law.”

Opponents are also upset by the inclusion in later grades of material which they feel shows undue deference to gay and transgender sensibilities

“Schools shouldn’t be in the business of trying to teach kids gender options,” said Jackson.

In the end, the petition gatherers went to Harbor Fellowship, where they waved signs at passing motorists, maintaining social distance and using face masks and hand sanitizer, according to Jackson.

They plan to be there every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, he said.

CORRECTON: Because of a typing error, an earlier version of this story quoted Rep. Young as saying he felt he had to “stand up to my constituents.” He actually said “stand up for my constituents.”

This story was originally published May 20, 2020 at 12:31 AM.