BRAUN: Putin's Russia wages war on its LGBTQ citizens

Liz Braun - Yesterday -  Toronto Sun

Let it never be said that “traditional family values” is an innocent term.

While America tries to turn back time over abortion rights, Russia has redoubled its efforts to blame the LGBTQ community for almost everything — even war.

The notion of traditional values is part of a smokescreen used by Russian state media to depict the gay community as a threat to the very fibre of what it means to be Russian.

The country is loudly homophobic, but things are so bad lately that an anti-gay stance was key to selling the war in Ukraine.

A recent article in the academic journal, The Conversation Canada, outline how the state and the Russian Orthodox Church have made LGBTQ activism the ultimate symbol of western corruption.

Carlton University professor Richard Foltz, in the article Homophobia as a wartime marketing tool: Some Russians fear the West will make them gay , wrote about the 2013 Russian legislation that banned anything that could be seen as promoting gay rights to children.

That law was described by Human Rights Watch as a “classic example of political homophobia” for “political gain.”

Now the law is a bout to be expanded, Foltz wrote, “to anything construed as presenting information about homosexuality and would apply to all ages.”

(As the Russian Book Union recently noted, this could mean the banning of classics by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, among others — bit of a problem.)

The LGBTQ community has been a useful target for 10 years in the state’s attempt to separate Russia — conservative and family oriented — from the perverse and hedonistic West.

According to foreign policy.com , this has become a matter of national security in Russia. Anyone who does not conform to ideas of heterosexual family norms is a threat.

The anti-gay agenda in Russia has fuelled a big increase in hate crimes and is just part of a larger hate campaign the state appears to be waging.

Both President Vladimir Putin and Russian Orthodox Church leader Patriarch Kirill have presented the invasion of Ukraine as a form of holy resistance against the LGBTQ — people they claim are representative of failed Western morals.

It all sounds frankly bizarre — except that, as foreignpolicy.com wrotes , Russia’s attacks on the rights of LGBTQ citizens is approved of by Christian conservative groups in the U.S. and elsewhere. Hungary has passed a similar gay propaganda law, while Romania and Poland are thinking it over.

Moreover, as Foltz stated, using LGBTQ issues to win support for the invasion of Ukraine means Russia has a lot in common with the Republican Party in the U.S. “and their cynical exploitation of the abortion debate and other social issues.

“In both cases,” Foltz wrote, “a deliberate policy of inflaming the ignorant and irrational passions of broad segments of the population appears to have great success in stifling science and rational discourse — along with any level of human compassion.”

(Canada is not immune from such “deliberate policies” — as with Pierre Poilievre purposely using his videos to appeal to far-right, misogynistic online movements.)

Earlier this year, NBC reported on the massive donations to 11 American nonprofits identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.

Some of the groups assert that, “LGBTQ people are a threat to society itself,” and some justify violence against the community.

The common thread in all this is how hate translates into political power.

If the Parental Rights in Education bill — Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill — is signed into law, it would prohibit “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” in the state’s primary schools.

Sounds just like that repressive anti-gay Russian legislation of 2013.