On Thursday, a Seattle jury convicted three young men from northern Washington of assault and committing a hate crime for savagely beating Micah Painter with a beer bottle last June because Painter is gay. So reports the city's major daily, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, with a few added notes on the jury -- half of which wished it could deliver a stronger sentence -- and the implications of the verdict for the state's pending gay-rights bill. The tidiness and brevity of the PI's report is apparently par for the course in the media treatment of this case, according to Eli Sanders of Seattle's alternative weekly, The Stranger, who notes that when the story has been covered at all, it has been cast as a clash of culture-war opposites, an ugly enactment of the dispute between rural and urban America, between straights and gays. But in a hefty investigation of the case -- exceptional for the depth of its reporting, the sharpness of its writing, and its able grasp of history -- Sanders presents a far more complicated picture of both Painter, a once-promising gymnist who fell into drug-use and prostitution after running away from alleged physical abuse at the hands of his evangelical preacher father, and his attackers, all Russian and Ukrainian evangelical immigrants whose families came to America in the '80s and '90s as part of the exodus of evangelical Christians fleeing Soviet persecution, and who were simultaneously committed members of their Slavic Baptist church in Bellingham, WA, and wild, heavy-drinking kids who frequently ran afoul of the law.