This is what liberal "tolerance" looks like....

About 13 Christian young people who had gone to 18th and Castro streets Friday night, November 14, to sing praise songs soon were escorted out of the neighborhood by police after dozens of angry homosexuals confronted and surrounded them.

The Castro has been a gathering spot over the past couple of weekends for people rallying against the passage of Proposition 8, but there apparently hadn’t been any large protests in the neighborhood that night.

Missy Huff, a 21-year-old with Promised Land Fellowship, said she and about 13 other young people gathered at the intersection only to play guitar, sing, and worship, something they’ve done many other times over the past three years without incident.

Huff said they were singing "Amazing Grace" and "Oh, the Blood of Jesus" and hadn’t said anything to anyone when two men - members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence - approached them and "started getting pretty upset."

The Sister took out a large, dark green cloth and put it around the young people so people couldn’t see them, said Huff.

Huff said the Sister, who apparently was Timothy Ryan, also known as Sister Mary Timothy, approached another of the group and said things like, "We don’t need to be saved. How dare you come out here."

Ryan told the Bay Area Reporter in an e-mail what he said was, "We do not need to be saved and we are not a ’broken’ community!"

Ryan, who helped alert others to the Christian teen's presence in the neighborhood, wrote that he and his husband, Michael Medema, took his sari, "and shielded the community from their hate..."

Huff said Medema was telling people the young people were there regarding Prop 8, which Huff said wasn’t the case. Angry people started gathering around them, Huff said, and yelling and screaming. She said there was eventually a mob of about 200 people screaming "Shame on you!" and "Go home to where you came from!"

Huff said the cloth was still wrapped around them when a man she couldn’t see dumped hot coffee on the faces of her and another woman. "It was pretty scary," she said.

Medema eventually removed the sari from around the young people. Then, Huff said an unidentified man picked up one of the group’s Bibles and started walking away with it. The man hit Cloud over the head with the Bible, shoved her to the ground, and started kicking her legs, Huff said. A couple people from the crowd pulled the man off Cloud, she said. Cloud said, "I was really scared" when the man attacked her. "I just didn’t want things to get worse ... I was afraid he was going to go crazy." She said she felt safe after the man was pulled off of her.

Huff said a police officer grabbed the man and asked Cloud if she wanted to press charges, but she declined. The officer let the man go and told him not to come back that night, said Huff.

Ryan said he did see a woman, probably Cloud, get knocked down. The young people stayed in a circle singing while "tons of people," many of them coming out of bars, shoved the group and continued yelling things, Huff said. She said one man threatened their team leader, saying, "I’m gonna kill you."

Huff said a police officer confronted the men. At this point, she said, people surrounding the group had gotten whistles and were getting as close to them and as loud as they could, but the group kept singing. One of the men in her group had called police, Huff said, and 15 to 20 officers arrived wearing riot gear.

Around that time, she said, people in the crowd started assaulting the men in the Christian group, trying to pull their pants dawn and grabbing them inappropriately. The men put the women in the middle of the group to protect them, said Huff.

The police made a line between the Christian group and the crowd while people continued to scream and yell, Huff said, and at least one officer told the group the police feared for the young people’s safety, and they would need to escort them out. The police continually asked the crowd to keep a few feet between themselves and the young people, and the police intervened every time someone got too close to them, he wrote.

Huff said by 8:30 the officers surrounded her team and escorted them to their van, which was parked at 20th and Eureka streets, as a crowd followed them.

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Asked if they’d had any idea something like this could happen, Huff said her group had "considered it would be a little more intense than normal" and that’s why they had decided just to sing, rather than approach people as they would normally do. But "we didn’t think anything like this would happen," Huff said. She said she got a knot on her head and a bruise on her leg, but it was "nothing very serious at all." Huff said she believes her group will return to the Castro at some point.

"We go to the Castro all the time," she said. "We have friends there. We love the people who live in the Castro, and in no way hold what happened Friday night against them."

Eric Smith, 51, who lives near where the group’s van was parked, said he witnessed a portion of the incident. Smith said people were shouting things like "Get out of our neighborhood!" and he saw a crowd - still blowing whistles - follow as police escorted the young people to their van. Once they got there, he said the police stopped the crowd.