Russia Declares the Gay Rights Movement as "Extremist"

As his military remains bogged down in Ukraine Vladimir Putin continues to demonize and attack individuals and groups within Russia to distract the populace from his Ukrainian quagmire. Much like in some of Donald Trump's recent deranged rants, Putin seeks to paint internal groups as a threat to society and in the process criminalizes individuals and groups.   Sadly, one of Putin's favored targets is the LGBT community within Russia.  This past week, Russia's puppet supreme court in a secret hearing - no doubt to the delight of the reactionaries within the Russian Orthodox Church - labeled LGBT groups as "extremist" and further opened the door for LGBT persecution in Russia. American LGBT individuals, especially the ever delusional Log Cabin Republicans and other gay Republicans who think their whiteness and relative affluence will protect them, should take note of what a second Trump regime filled with Christofascist homophobes could usher in. Other segments of society need to realize that once a fascist ruler is in power, the list of enemies and those painted as "other" always widens and those who through complacency or otherwise stood back and did nothing later find themselves on the enemies list.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this disturbing development.  Here are excerpts: 

Russia’s Supreme Court on Thursday declared the international gay rights movement an “extremist organization,” another chilling crackdown on gay and transgender people whose rights have been scaled back drastically since the start of the war in Ukraine.

The court was acting on a lawsuit filed by the Ministry of Justice requesting the designation. When it filed the case on Nov. 17, the ministry said the activities of the international L.G.B.T.Q. movement had exhibited “various signs and manifestations of an extremist orientation, including incitement of social and religious hatred.”

The ruling escalates the threat for gay communities inside Russia. Gay rights activists and other experts say the ruling will put gay people and their organizations at risk of being criminally prosecuted for something as simple as displaying symbols like the rainbow flag or for endorsing the statement “Gay rights are human rights.”

Experts said the decision would make the work of all L.G.B.T.Q. organizations, as well as any political activity, untenable.

It could be used to mete out jail sentences of six to 10 years to gay rights activists, their lawyers or others involved in any kind of public effort.

That prospect has heightened angst and alarm in the country’s already beleaguered gay communities.

“It is not the first time we are being targeted, but at the same time, it is another blow,” said Alexander Kondakov, a Russian sociologist at University College Dublin, who studies the intersection of law and security for the L.G.B.T.Q. communities. “You are already marked as foreign, as bad, as a source of propaganda, and now you are labeled an extremist — and the next step is terrorist.”

President Vladimir V. Putin has sought to portray the troubled, protracted war that he started as a fight to maintain “Russian traditional values.” To that end, the gay communities are often portrayed as a potential Trojan horse for the West.

The court decision comes months before Mr. Putin is expected to use what he calls his defense of Russian values as a pillar of his campaign in the March 2024 presidential elections.

The four-hour court session on Thursday was held behind closed doors because the case was declared secret, according to Russian press reports. Although at least one gay rights organization outside Russia sought to oppose the case in court, no countering arguments were allowed, the reports said.

The judge ruled that the decision would take effect immediately.

Under the ruling, any news organization, blogger or even an individual posting some form of public message that mentions the international L.G.B.T.Q. movement without noting the extremist designation could face a stiff fine.

Soon after the decision, the official RIA Novosti news agency began referring to the movement as an extremist organization in its reports on the ruling.

Ivan Zhdanov, the director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation . . . said the decision was the opening shot in Mr. Putin’s presidential campaign and called it an example of an increasingly isolated Russia emulating the laws of its ally Iran.

“There will be a complete distraction from real problems, the creation of mythical enemies, discrimination of the population on various grounds, this is just the beginning,” Mr. Zhdanov wrote on the social messaging app X, formerly Twitter.

The way the Ministry of Justice wrote the proposed designation was ambiguous, so it could be exploited by virtually anyone to denounce a gay person as an extremist, such as a provincial law enforcement officer hostile toward gay people or neighbors who covet a gay couple’s apartment, experts said.

[T]he Kremlin has increasingly slapped the “extremist” label on organizations that it does not like. Aside from Mr. Navalny’s opposition movement, they include the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose presence in Russia is opposed by the Russian Orthodox Church; and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which the Russian government has accused of spreading Russophobia.

In Russia, measures targeting L.G.B.T.Q. groups started in earnest after 2012, when Mr. Putin returned to the presidency. In 2013, Russia passed a law banning “gay propaganda” directed toward minors and expanded that in 2022 to prohibit anything that, it said, smacked of endorsing “nontraditional relationships and pedophilia” among all Russians.

There is a long tradition of nations at war singling out minority groups, especially gay people, for prosecution, such as Nazi Germany. The effort to build support for the war inevitably involves identifying external and internal enemies, and in Russia the generally negative attitude toward gay people dovetails with this effort, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a social anthropologist who studies the ripple effects of the war on Russian society.

Negative attitudes toward gays are especially prevalent among Russians older than 65, who are also Mr. Putin’s core supporters. They identify with his promise to return to the Russia of 1970, when the idea of gay rights and fluid sexuality did not exist publicly, she said.

Days before announcing the lawsuit, a deputy minister of justice, Andrei Loginov, testified before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva that, in Russia, “the rights of L.G.B.T. people are protected,” saying that “restraining public demonstrations of nontraditional sexual relations or preferences is not a form a censure for them.”

Be very afraid of what could happen in America should Trump with his Christofascist/white supremacists base of support regain control of the White House.