The badly misnamed Russian Ministry of Justice has forbidden an organization in that country from establishing a Pride House for gay and lesbian athletes during the 2014 Winter Olympic games, and a Russian court has upheld that decision — using arguments that sound remarkably like the rhetoric from anti-gay groups in the United States.
The aims of the organization contradict the basics of public morality and the policy of the state in the area of family motherhood and childhood protection. The activities of the [Pride House] movement leads to propaganda of non-traditional sexual orientation which can undermine the security of the Russian society and the state, provoke social-religious hatred, which is the feature of the extremist character of the activity.
Moreover it can undermine the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation due to the decrease of Russia’s population.
Such aims as creating an understanding of the necessity to fight against homophobia and the creation of positive attitudes towards LGBT sportsmen contradicts with the basics of public morality because they are directed towards the increase of the number of citizens of sexual minorities which breaches the understanding of good and evil, good and bad, vice and virtue.
Substitute America for Russia and that could have been written by Tony Perkins, Matt Barber or any other American bigot.
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Raging Bee
March 19, 2012 at 11:00 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And we wonder why the Communist Party is becoming popular again…
Tony
March 19, 2012 at 11:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Someone please remind me again…we live in the 21st century right? Gah!
I’m glad visiting Russia isn’t on my bucket list. I rather like the idea of ‘Pride Houses’.
sc_971a13ed081fe55ce520bf693fc9354a
March 19, 2012 at 12:44 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Our dear friends in the Russian Orthodox Church I take it?
amenhotepstein
March 19, 2012 at 12:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
But what will our fundie friends do? If dem Commies is fur it, then we’s agin’ it! So’s we gotta support that there Pride House now, right?
Right?
-head asplode-
Rob F
March 19, 2012 at 1:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This is par for the course in Russia. An airline forced a gay flight attendant to marry a woman.
The real kicker?
The women he married had to get divorced in order to marry him. In order words, one marriage was destroyed so someone could get married for a reason that is not one of the reasons homophobes always claim marriage is for.
John Hinkle
March 19, 2012 at 2:01 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah, the infamous religious privilege.
Can’t upset those drenched in woo, can we. Why, they might get so mad they’ll eject spittle. And what if the people near them aren’t wearing rain coats? It’s just too ugly to contemplate.
Nemo
March 19, 2012 at 3:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And then there’s this: http://www.allout.org/en/actions/russia_silenced
ema
March 19, 2012 at 5:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Moreover it can undermine the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation due to the decrease of Russia’s population.
How true, because the moment a gay couple gets together their reproductive organs just, poof, cease to function properly.
Pierce R. Butler
March 19, 2012 at 6:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Substitute America for Russia and that could have been written by Tony Perkins…
No, Tony Perkins would have tried to work in some lame-ass pun.
emiliamurphy
April 5, 2012 at 1:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
While the Russian Orthodox Church is probably not the most gay-friendly organization in the world, it is worth noting that homosexuality (male homosexuality, that is) was illegal in the militantly anti-religious Soviet Union. So I doubt a return to Communism in Russia would be the right move for gays in that country.
Similarly, I find it almost laughable when some ‘progressive’ women embrace Communism when the worst violations of women’s reproductive rights in recent years took place not in some God-bothering right-wing theocracy but in a left-wing officially atheistic state: Communist Romania. Another little laugh: our supposedly Bible-thumping Conservative government in Canada has been one of the first to speak out against St. Petersburg’s – St. Petersburg, Russia, not St. Petersburg, Florida – ban on gay ‘propaganda.’ So choose your allies and enemies carefully!
déboucheur bruxelles
May 31, 2012 at 12:04 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
déboucheur bruxelles…
[...]Official and Legal Bigotry in Russia | Dispatches from the Culture Wars[...]…