"We've been accepted and were just perking along," said Sloan, a 69-year-old church pastor and co-founder of Lambda Community Center, which serves the gay community. "That's why this Russian thing was such a jolt to people."
Leaders of the religious right, however, celebrate the Russian efforts as a revival.
"My hope and my prayer," said Mark Matta, a former legislative aide who heads the Christian Public Awareness Ministries, "is that they will become a voice in the wilderness for the rest of the country."
Many credit the Slavic Christian immigrant community with filling a void left by the traditional American church and providing reinforcements in the ongoing culture wars over what should define family, acceptable sexual relationships and marriage.
"Russian Christians bring a fresh faith and uncorrupted family values to this country. They are a shining model for the rest of us in terms of faith, family, work ethic, patriotism and community," said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families.
Gay civil rights activists, meanwhile, accuse the demonstrators of hateful and aggressive tactics that they say sometimes lean dangerously toward violence.
Signs displayed by the demonstrators often equate homosexuality with pedophilia and describe the AIDS epidemic as a message from God. One of the common tactics of the demonstrators is to tap gays forcefully on the head and announce that they have been "saved."
"They've declared war on us for some reason," said Stand Up for Sacramento founder Nathan Feldman, a jewelry store clerk. "They got it into their heads that California is the land of sin and that it is their duty to cleanse the state, starting with homosexuals."
Feldman said he formed his self-defense organization after he was surrounded by dozens of Russian-speaking demonstrators at a June gay pride parade.
"I ended up getting spit on and yelled at," said Feldman, whose organization recently staged a counterdemonstration outside Bethany Slavic Missionary Church.
Prokopchuk, the Sacramento County sheriff's deputy, is for many here the voice of law and order in the Russian-Ukrainian community. A garrulous bear of a man with a burr haircut, he appears regularly on local Russian television and radio. His cellphone constantly rings with calls asking him to interpret and explain American laws and responsibilities.
