It was a gathering of clergymen worthy of a religious festival: a line of dozens of bearded priests in black robes, with heavy silver crosses hanging on their chests. And yet, you couldn’t imagine a less holy march. The clergymen led a huge mob along the main street of Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia, through a police cordon, and toward a small group of visibly nervous young men and women who had set out to mark the International Day Against Homophobia.

“Fuck your mothers,” a priest shouted.

Another priest came armed with a stool. Their followers carried rocks, sticks, and crucifixes. “Kill them! Don’t let them leave alive,” they screamed.

They smashed heads, windows of shops, and a minibus in which activists tried to escape. Twelve people, including three policemen, were seriously injured.

“Before the van arrived, about ten girls—gay rights activists—were being taunted by a growing, frothing mob. A stone was thrown and split a girl’s head open.… This mob was the creation of the Georgian Orthodox Church and the Georgian government has so far been gutless in standing up to the Church to protect the rights of its citizens. Shame on you, Georgia. Shame on you,” Paul Rimple, a Tbilisi-based journalist, posted on his Facebook page. He later wrote about it for the Moscow Times.

“A Georgian Taliban has been born,” read status updates of other Georgians on Facebook. Some changed their location settings to Iran. But those who opposed the priests and those who cheered them agree that gay rights—an issue, until now, seen as marginal by most Georgians—has become a proxy for a larger conflict.

As I looked through videos and photographs of the attack, I spotted a familiar bearded face in the crowd of angry anti-gay protesters: the excommunicated Orthodox priest Basili Mkalavishvili. A dozen years ago, when I was reporting for the BBC from Georgia, Father Basili, as he is known among his supporters, invited me for a cup of tea in his little church on the outskirts of Tbilisi. He told me he was proud to be cleansing Georgia of “satanic forces.” He wasn’t shy about discussing the techniques he used in his crusade against religious minorities. Hitting Jehovah’s Witnesses with iron crucifixes, he said, was an effective way of fighting them. But, when I asked, he denied raiding their homes.

“That’s not true,” he told me. “We find out where they gather, and then we wait for them outside. When they come out, that’s when we attack them.” He also said that he was thankful to the Georgian police force for their support.

Father Basili may have been a particularly brazen thug but he was not an isolated misfit. At the time, then President Eduard Shevardnadze had lost control of his corrupt family, his ministers, and even parts of the country. In 2003, a peaceful revolution, sparked by a fraudulent election, brought to power a team of young libertarian politicians led by the Columbia-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili. He sacked the entire Shevardnadze-era police force. Thousands of people, from mere potheads to former government officials, went to prison for offenses that, a short time before, many Georgians hadn’t even considered crimes. Many of the reforms were dizzying—electricity supplies stabilized, petty crime disappeared, the economy grew, tourists arrived—and, for many, disorienting. That the rest of the country wanted to get off his high-speed modernization train didn’t seem to matter to Saakashvili. But even nontraditionalists began to object to his government’s abuse of power, including a crackdown on the media and on public protests. He dismissed those critics, too.

By 2005, religious minorities in Georgia were far safer, while Father Basili was hiding in his church from the police, who were looking to bring him in on charges of inciting religious hatred and violence. The government had been cautious with the Orthodox Church, and many assumed that arrest of a priest in a temple was a red line that Saakashvili would not dare to cross. They were wrong. Not only did the special forces storm the church and arrested Father Basili but they televised the operation, too. It was typical Saakashvili: teach everyone a lesson.

By 2012, footage of Father Basili’s dramatic arrest was back on television—but this time it was used against Saakashvili. The opposition’s entire campaign in a key parliamentary election was built on the notion that Georgians had paid too high a price for the changes that the government brought.

The opposition coalition, called the Georgian Dream, was united by the money of the billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili. He promised Georgians they could have it all: a pro-European political course, good relations with Russia, and democracy—all without anyone ever again offending patriarchal values. It was an attractive offer that resonated with conservative, church-going Georgians who said they were fed up with Saakashvili’s arrogant and forceful style. Ivanishvili won.

One of the first things Ivanishvili did when he became Prime Minister was to free some three thousand convicts, including a hundred and ninety that his party considered to be political prisoners. Among them was Giorgi Gabedava, who became a key organizer of the May 17th anti-gay rally. The rally was also where Father Basili made his first public appearance since his arrest. (After his release from prison, in 2008, because of poor health, he’d kept a low profile.) But these days, he’s just one in a growing corps of radical clergy whose intolerance is endorsed by the Orthodox Church. The night before the rally, Patriarch Ilia II, the Church’s leader, called homosexuality “an anomaly and a disease”; he has since failed to condemn behavior of his priests, dismissing it as merely “impolite.”

The U.S. State Department and the E.U. have both condemned the violence. The Georgian government has been more ambiguous. The Prime Minister has said that he supports minority rights but that Asaval Dasavali, an ultra-conservative publication that prints notable examples of hate speech, is his favorite newspaper. It took the Interior Ministry four days to finally arrest four members of the mob, just to release them again after they paid a sixty-dollar fine; two clerics were also charged with illegally impeding the right to assemble a week after the rally.

Incidentally, or perhaps not, the very same day, the government arrested two senior opposition leaders; one was the former Prime Minister Vano Merabishvili, who was known for his defiance of the Church.

In the meantime, there have been reports of random attacks on young men in Tbilisi. On Monday, the gay-rights organization Identoba appealed to the Ministry of Interior to protect them. Seven of their activists, the statement said, have been attacked since May 17th. The government is running out of time to show that it can control the situation, and the country, with something like fairness.

Natalia Antelava is a BBC journalist based in New Delhi. She has previously reported from the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Photograph by Irakli Gedenidze/AFP/Getty.