From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/belief/meet-american-religious-right-figures-thrilled-russias-brutal-anti-gay-laws
Putin has achieved much of what the American right-wing dreams of, and American religious conservatives are ecstatic.
By Adam Lee
September 19, 2013
Russia has become a dangerous place for dissent. Its ex-KGB president, Vladimir Putin, has accomplished what Republicans in America only dream of: he’s built an electoral majority by appealing to the most religious and conservative elements of society, including by courting the alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church. With his victories, he’s becoming increasingly autocratic, dispensing with even the pretense of democracy.
Besides his notorious sidestepping of term-limit laws, he’s presided over show-trial prosecutions of political opponents and reformers on flimsy or trumped-up charges. He’s brought down the wrath of the state against artists who mock religion. He’s looked the other way as crusading journalists have been brutally beaten and murdered, and his government may have been directly involved in at least one such killing. In the classic tactic of dictators everywhere, he’s diverting attention from his own authoritarianism by painting a marginalized minority as a powerful and sinister enemy corrupting society from within. In this case, the invented enemy is Russia’s LGBT community.
Over the last few years, Putin’s rubber-stamp parliament has passed a series of increasingly draconian anti-gay laws. The most recent of these outlaws “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”—a term so deliberately vague and sweeping that Russian activists can be ( and have been) arrested merely for holding up a sign in public reading “Gay is normal.” It effectively silences any advocacy for LGBT rights or even any public acknowledgment of LGBT people’s existence. An even more horrific bill now under consideration would take away children (both adopted and biological) from gay and lesbian parents.
With the Russian government sending clear signals that LGBT people are beneath moral consideration, it’s no surprise that violent homophobes in Russian society are feeling increasingly disinhibited. We’ve seen the premeditated torture and murder of gay people, and gangs of skinheads assaulting gay-rights protestors in public, sometimes with the police looking on, sometimes with the police’s active assistance.
In this climate of deepening fear and brutality, we’re already starting to see an exodus of gay people from Russian society, like the journalist Masha Gessen, who’s calling on Western nations to grant asylum: ” The only way at this point that the U.S. can help Russian gays and lesbians is [to] get us the hell out of here.” The historical parallel to the exodus of Jewish people from pre-World War II Nazi Germany seems impossible to ignore.
Continue reading at: http://www.alternet.org/belief/meet-american-religious-right-figures-thrilled-russias-brutal-anti-gay-laws
See Also:
LA Frontiers: America’s Biggest Exporter of Hate Brags About Role in Russia’s Anti-Gay Laws
