On the outskirts of Moscow, Masha Gessen is preparing dinner for her friends and family. She is an…
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http://www.euronews.com/2013/09/27/not-a-good-time-to-be-gay-in-russia
On the outskirts of Moscow, Masha Gessen is preparing dinner for her friends and family. She is an openly gay Russian-American journalist, who has three children with her girlfriend. But last June, President Putin and the Russian parliament unanimously passed a federal law which she says specifically targets her family.
Having won landslide support in the Duma, the bill bans the spreading of so-called “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” among minors.
While Putin claims this action helps safeguard and enshrine traditional Russian values, Gessen is adamant there is another reason behind the law: “Twenty months ago he looked out his window and saw the first set of huge protests. What he saw were enemies protesting not his regime, but Russia itself. That meant they were foreigners. The ‘others’. And LGBT people are the quintessential foreign agents. The quintessential ‘other’. It has nothing to do with homophobia, per say. It’s xenophobia in general. But who better personifies foreign or western influence than LGBTs. So we’re the first target but we’re not going to be the only target. It’s going to broaden out.”
Since the laws were passed targeting the LGBT community – which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender – there has been confrontation, first on a regional and then on a national level. Subsequent decrees have followed, including one banning adoption by gay couples and another allowing jail sentences of up to three years for blasphemy and “offending religious feelings”.
Gay rights activists’ worst fears of an increase in hate crimes have been realised with an upsurge in homophobic vigilantism since the introduction of the legislation, and even killings in some parts of Russia.
Elena Kostyuchenko works for Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s only independent newspapers to have come out as critical of the Kremlin. She is also a gay rights activist and the creator of the first ‘kiss-in protests’ in Moscow, which sparked other same-sex smooching rallies in front of Russian consulates across the world.
Kostyuchenko says the legislation has emboldened right-wing groups and LGBT protests in Russia now tend to follow a predictable routine: “They come to beat us up. How does this happen? We go in front of the Duma and kiss. They try to hit us and sometimes they succeed. They throw rotten eggs at us, ketchup, urine. The last time they put human faeces in condoms and threw them at us. Normally the police just stand there on the side and once we’ve been beaten up a bit, they take us away. That’s more or less how it happens.”
While Putin has come under heavy criticism from the United States and the EU for these laws, he has found a staunch ally in the Russian Orthodox Church. Forced underground during the Soviet era, today this religious body professes total allegiance to the state and warns that same sex marriage will lead to the Apocalypse.
As their spokesman, Vsevolod Chaplin, explained, the Russian Orthodox Church also believes homosexuals are trying to indoctrinate children with their values: “People are free to choose but now we’re seeing this lack of freedom when homosexuality is imposed on children and on adolescents. This is done through the internet, through (western) political propaganda, by political actions, by the gay lobby. And we don’t want this phenomenon being imposed on our children or adults by political pressure.”
Critics claim this type of argument gives extreme religious groups the green light for the harassment of homosexuals. Leonid Aprelsky is a member of the religious group ‘God’s Will’ and while he admits that sometimes there is confrontation, he says that today the law, and the police, are on their side: “Thanks to the new laws that have been adopted, now, for example, if we see sodomites openly walking in the streets handing out flyers with their ideas to children, all we have to do is call the police.”
His priest, Dmitry Smirnov, trusts in the common sense of those in the Duma: “It’s difficult to imagine that the entire parliament is made up of crazy people. So if the parliament is busy drafting such laws and voting for them at almost 100 percent, this means that they consider them relevant.”
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