The patriarch’s insistence that the war in Ukraine is all about gay parades reminded me of a brilliant Russian-language poem someone shared with me on Twitter the other day, written by Russian-Ukrainian poet Artem Polezhaka in late 2013 and titled “Reportage.” The poem hilariously spoofs state-owned Russian television’s hysterical reporting on the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv: the reporter breathlessly recounts the increasingly grotesque horrors he supposedly witnesses—a mélange that features neo-Nazis, jihadists, looters, cannibals, and Jews who “drink Christian babies’ blood by the bucket”—but keeps coming back to gay orgies.
It made me think, too, of fairly common claims by pro-Kremlin conservatives in the United States that the real reason the libs hate Putin and Putin’s Russia is the homophobia. Most recently, this argument was trotted out by political commentator Richard Hanania in a Substack post which argued that liberal elites in America had viewed the Putin regime with relative indifference until 2013, when Russia “passed a law banning gay propaganda towards minors” (in reality, restricting any gay-themed content in any place where minors could see it, including public events promoting gay rights), and Putin began his transformation into a Hollywood villain.
Were some Western progressives more incensed by Russia’s “gay propaganda” law than by the brutal suppression of peaceful protests, the crushing of the independent media, the election-rigging, and the rest of the Putin regime’s systematic assault on civil liberties? No doubt. But the Putin-loving “trads,” in Russia or in America—be it Patriarch Kirill, Pat Buchanan, Steve Bannon (who recently praised Putin on his podcast for not being “woke” and pointed out that “they don’t have the Pride flags” in Russia), or Hanania—are at least as obsessed with the idea of the Putin regime as the nemesis of LGBT rights.
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