Senior Russian MP concerned about new European values

(Interfax – April 18, 2013) New moral values that have recently emerged in Europe may seriously complicate Russia-EU relations, Aleksey Pushkov, chairman of the State Duma International Affairs Committee, has said. He was speaking at parliamentary hearings in the State Duma on relations between Russia and the EU on 18 April, Russian privately-owned news agency Interfax reported on the same day.

Commenting on the issues of same-sex marriages and adoption of children by homosexual families, he said: “The idea is not popular in Russia, to say the least, but it is becoming more and more popular in a number of European countries.”

Pushkov went on to say that he had discussed with his colleagues from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe whether the same-sex marriage was indeed a European value or not. “We were told that it was not a value yet but it appeared that it might become one. And then we will be asked: ‘How are things going with these values in your country? We are already done with this, we have adopted them’,” Pushkov said.

At the same time, he said that Russia had no intention to demand that Europe should not legalize same-sex marriages. “We believe that European society is developing in accordance with its own criteria. But certain behaviour models are for some reason imposed on us,” he said, as quoted by Interfax.

Pushkov admitted that he considered the idea of new European values extremely dangerous. “I find this idea of new values very explosive. We subscribed to traditional democratic values, but I think we will hardly subscribe to the new values although they are trying to gradually turn them into universal,” Pushkov was quoted as saying.