Putin: Gay people will be safe at Olympics if they ‘leave kids alone’
[LOL'd to tears!]
MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin said Friday that gay people have nothing to fear in Russia as long as they leave children alone.
Putin met with a group of volunteers in the Olympic mountain venue at Krasnaya Polyana near Sochi on Friday to wish them success at the Games. During a question-and-answer session, a volunteer asked him about Russia’s attitudes toward gays, a subject that has provoked worldwide controversy, and Putin offered what was apparently meant to be a reassuring answer for visitors to the Olympics.
“One can feel calm and at ease,” he said. “Just leave kids alone, please.”
That phrasing — with its intimation that gays might prey on children — hardly seems the kind of guarantee sought by the United States and other Western governments and human rights activists.
Gay rights have become a contentious issue at the Olympics, which begin Feb. 7, because Russia passed a law last year prohibiting “propaganda of nontraditional sexual practices” among minors. The law has been used to ban gay rights parades — children might see them — and to curb discussion of gay issues on television and in newspapers for fear that those younger than 18 might hear or read about homosexuality. Teachers ignore the subject, isolating gay teenagers. Some homophobes have interpreted the law as encouragement to beat up gays. And there has been talk of taking children away from gay parents.
Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD, a U.S. advocacy group, said her heart went out to gay and lesbian families who had to live under harsh Russian laws. “Mr. Putin can peddle fear and misinformation, but the global community is increasingly siding with equality for all people,” she said.
The law has provoked deep concern in the United States and other Western countries, where it is seen as an infringement on human rights. European leaders have decided to stay away from the Games, and President Obama sent a protest message by choosing a delegation to represent him that includes Billie Jean King, a well-known gay athlete.
“I think the best thing that can be done is that the media continue to shine a light on this issue,” said Norman Bellingham, former chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “There is always the hope that having the Games in an environment brings the full force of the world’s media on the issues in that particular country or region.”
The International Olympic Committee has steadfastly refused to criticize Russia, saying it believes assurances that there will be no discrimination.
Activists think otherwise.
“Putin’s promise that gay and lesbian Olympians and spectators will be safe in Sochi is meant to distract from his country’s oppression of its LGBT citizens,” said Andrew Miller, a member of Queer Nation, a gay rights group based in New York. “That gays are dangerous to children is an obvious lie meant to justify his violation of the human rights of gay men and women. We are not fooled, and neither is the world.”
Children are everywhere, said Julianne Howell, reached at home in Loveland, Ohio, where she has organized a petition drive on Change.org to persuade sponsors to drop their support of the Olympics to protest the gay law. “Simply being gay in front of children is wrong under the law. It means you can’t be yourself.”
Speaking to a room full of volunteers dressed in their Sochi warm-up gear, Putin attempted to put Russia on higher moral ground than other countries. Homosexuality is not a crime in Russia, as it was in the Soviet Union. Homosexuality was legalized in 1993. Police, he said, do not pluck gays off the street. In the United States, he asserted, some states impose criminal penalties for homosexual relations. Not Russia, he said. (In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that laws prohibiting gay sex were unconstitutional.)
“We have no ban on the nontraditional forms of sexual intercourse among people,” Putin said in remarks carried by the Interfax news service. “We have the ban on the propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia. I want to stress this: propaganda among minors. These are two absolutely different things: a ban on certain relations or the propaganda of such relations.”
One more question: Why, a volunteer asked, do Russia’s Olympic uniforms contain the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow being a symbol of gay rights?
Don’t ask him, the president said. “I didn’t design the uniform.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/putin-gays-will-be-safe-at-olym...
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by opt˟ on
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Russia is brilliant. They are playing the game of life so well its scary.
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As long as American leaders keep acting like assholes, Russia is going to capitalize hard.
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Permalink Reply by Frances Farmer on
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Most Certainly.
Putin. Love that guy!
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Nice- thanks!
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I take a pulse of nations with foreign languages by listening to their underground music, a universal language. Ain't no cops infiltrating our stompin grounds. They are dark, packed, loud, after hours, unlisted, underground, mobile. At best, a few undercover pigs get in there to bust people for drugs, but the cops don't ever make it to the back room. People talk, word spreads.
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Thats a great strategy for understanding, if I do say so. I do something similar- looking for currents/trends across genres and borders. Because of that sort of awareness, I couldn't help but notice the absence of a concerted effort on Russia's part to join the 'fuck this shit' global rebellion. Just saying. Could be that the poor bastards are just too busy freezing their asses off standing in line for wet bread and their daily pint of vodka to bother, but it could also be that they're just alright.
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Open season for heterosexual pedophiles!
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Yea I don't think thats what he meant.
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Well it could certainly be inferred using a modicum of reasoning skills.
I mean, why not just make a statement that *ANYONE* (straight, gay or bisexual) who is a pedophile, will be safe, if they leave kids alone?
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Permalink Reply by Charles Royer Sr. on
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Barack Obama selects gay athletes for Sochi Olympics
President Barack Obama sent Russia a clear message about its treatment of gays and lesbians with who he is - and isn't - sending to represent the United States at the Sochi Olympics.Billie Jean King will be one of two openly gay athletes in the US delegation for the opening and closing ceremonies, Obama announced Tuesday. For the first time since 2000, however, the US will not send a president, former president, first lady or vice president to the Games.
Oboma pretty cavalier as usual about other peoples lives however he's not even a pimple on Putins ass.
Who is Vladimir Putin?
When the Soviet empire began to unravel, Putin returned to Leningrad (since renamed St. Petersburg) and established the city's new hard-currency exchange....Intelligence sources tell Insight that Putin's former professor at the local KGB academy, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, appointed him as first deputy mayor responsible for foreign relations and trade -- the heart of corrupt hard-currency operations in the scandal-plagued city council. There he met Stepashin, then a police lieutenant colonel elected to the Russian parliament whom Yeltsin named secret-police chief of St. Petersburg. Stepashin's wife happened to be a top executive in a large St. Petersburg bank. Fellow Leningrader Chubais, as presidential chief of staff in 1996, tapped Putin to become Kremlin business manager in charge of the multibillion-dollar empire under presidential control - and to become part of the Family.Putin ultimately succeeded Stepashin as FSB director. His immediate subordinate, Lt. Gen. Viktor Cherkesov, was a career dissident-hunter from the Leningrad KGB Fifth Chief Directorate, the notorious political police unit that persecuted dissidents and religious believers. Human-rights activists in St. Petersburg, including artist Georgy Mikhailov and Jewish refuseniks, tell Insight that Cherkesov personally interrogated and abused them under Soviet rule.
Putin's tenure as FSB director was marred last year by allegations from within the agency that it was involved in extortion and murder rackets. Putin personally took charge of the investigation of the November 1998 assassination of democratic opposition lawmaker Galina Starovoitova in her St. Petersburg apartment building, but allowed the probe to fizzle. Starovoitova, a prominent human-rights worker and anti-corruption crusader, was investigating the contract killing of a St. Petersburg privatization chief at the time of her death. She had frequently directed her ire at the FSB. She even introduced legislation in the Duma, or parliament, that would have banned former KGB officers who engaged in political repression from holding any public office, a law that would have kept the likes of Putin and Cherkesov out of government.
Putin handed the Starovoitova case - considered post-Soviet Russia's highest profile political assassination - to former dissident-hunter Cherkesov. That action, human-rights leaders argue, ensured that the killers would never be found. Sergei Alexeyev, a local leader of Starovoitova's Democratic Russia Party, told reporters at the time, "If Cherkesov's been brought into the case, you can consider it buried." And so it appears to be.
A month after the Starovoitova murder, Putin showed his nostalgia for the golden days of the Soviet police state. He gave a televised address on Dec. 20, 1998, to celebrate the 81st anniversary of the founding of the Bolshevik Cheka secret police, praising the Cheka but saying nothing about its systematic executions of political opponents. He then hosted a gala at KGB headquarters to honor the Cheka.
When he rose to lead the day-to-day operations of the presidential security council last March, Putin placed dissident-hunter Cherkesov in de facto control of the FSB. He used his extraordinary Kremlin powers to shut down investigations into financial crimes and corruption. "Over the past three months, Putin has carried out a pogrom of sorts in the Russian judicial system," according to [Victor] Yasmann. "One of the main results was to practically paralyze all federal-prosecutor offices around the country. He cashiered federal investigators, including general officers, involved in criminal investigations in state-prosecutor offices probing economic crimes."
Vladimir Putin: The Face of Russia To Come http://www.angelfire.com/rebellion2/cheka/lasombradelakgb/01eef7951...
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