Anti-gay laws? Don’t take the bait

Russian Duma Building

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan, Editor and Correspondent at themoscownews.com – September 6, 2013)

With the international gay community up in arms over Russia’s so-called anti-gay laws – which don’t outlaw gays but only the promotion of their lifestyles – there’s a new bit of legislation that goes out of its way to crack down on homosexuality.

Andrei Zhuravlyov, a member of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, has proposed removing children from homes where one of the parents is gay. His bill says in an accompanying note that “the harm that could be inflicted on a child’s mental health in case of their parent’s homosexual contacts is immense.”

Whether or not the proposal will go anywhere in Parliament, it’s the latest bid to crack down on homosexuality as something foreign to Russia and decadent without going as far as outlawing homosexual acts per se. In that regard, it’s part of a precarious legislative dance that’s been going on for months.

The now-notorious bill outlawing the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors was signed into law in June. The following month, President Vladimir Putin also signed a law that banned child adoptions by same-sex couples in Russia, and even by singles in countries where same-sex marriage is legal.

All the while, Putin himself insists – as he did in last week’s interview with the AP and Channel One – that Russia doesn’t discriminate against gays and is a perfectly modern country which ditched its laws against the LGBT community decades ago. Gay couples who want to wear rainbows to the Sochi Olympics next year have nothing to worry about, he said.

In light of that, what does Zhuravlyov’s proposal mean, is it as scary as it sounds, and what should we do about it if it is?

First of all, it’s worth understanding where all these laws targeting gays are coming from. They’re not coming directly from Putin, given his statements. Given that previous conservative proposals by Zhuravlyov and other deputies like him have been thrown out, what we’re looking at isn’t a centralized anti-gay drive, but rather a number of loyal functionaries who are overly eager to please. The people like Zhuravlyov want to tap into yearnings for a sense of Russianness, as they define it, to unite against something foreign and “other.”

What’s happening in Russia right now is a kind of moral panic – and it’s not unique to Russian society. If Russian functionaries who want to appear patriotic are going after homosexuality, their American counterparts are going after abortion. Dig around, and you’ll find a similar slew of really scary laws that all but criminalize miscarriages in some Midwestern states.

The difference, of course, is that an independent court system in the United States means that most of these laws will be struck down as unconstitutional, or at least there’s hope for that. In Russia, whether these laws will actually be applied depends on the discretion of the president.

Now, I’m going to say something that might sound counterintuitive. What should we do about legislative proposals such as Zhuravlyov’s? Nothing. First of all, because there’s really nothing we can do, besides trying to explain what they’re about as objectively as we can.

But it’s also true that ultra-loyal functionaries like Zhuravlyov thrive on controversies. Moral panics like this one are fueled by a sense of being besieged. I’ve interviewed Zhuravlyov and lawmakers like him in the past, and one thing that stands out is that their initiatives are very often sincere reactions to something they see in the media.

They’re not told what to do; rather, these people are interpreting what they see as an attack on patriotic values as a call to action, lashing out at anything they perceive as unpatriotic. Don’t look for a rational objective in their legislation – there isn’t one.

The more you fight them – with media awareness campaigns, or protest rallies, or calls to boycott the Olympics – the more they’ll fight back.

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