What did
Emma Green-Tregaro do, and why did it upset Isinbayeva?
Take a
look….
This is,
apparently, unacceptable in Russia, where both athletes are competing, and
where president Vladimir Putin makes it illegal to distribute “homosexual propaganda," as defined below.
…information
that can harm the spiritual or physical health of a minor, including forming
the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and
non-traditional marital relations.
Read
closely; this doesn’t mean distributing “homosexual propaganda” to minors, it
means—look, can I just call it HP? It’s Saturday afternoon, I’m lazy, and
besides, writing out this “homosexual propaganda” nonsense makes my stomach
churn.
So—distributing
any HP to anyone would be illegal, even to an adult. And what happens if
you do? You can be fined up to $30,000.
Right,
and what else can’t you do in Russia, or in this case, Moscow?
Have
a gay pride march for the next one hundred years. The clip below quite clearly
shows what happens when you do.
Of course, that’s better than what happened in St. Petersburg—be warned, the blood is flowing in this one….
The situation for gay people is deteriorating in Russia; here’s what one writer, Masha Gessen, has to say:
Two
things happened to me the same month: I was beaten up in front of parliament
for the first time and I realized that in all my interactions, including
professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am
now a person with a pink triangle.
My
family is moving to New York. We have the money and documents needed to do that
with relative ease – unlike thousands of other LGBT families and individuals in
Russia.
Gessen
is a fighter, not a quitter. But she consulted a lawyer—could they go after her
adopted son, since another law makes it illegal for gay people to adopt? The
lawyer’s answer, “your answer is at the airport.”
Nor
is that all. According to the Mother Jones magazine, a fake web site
has been set up to lure gay men on “dates.” Here’s
Mother Jones on the subject:
Led by
notorious Russian neo-Nazi Maksim "Tesak" ("the Hatchet")
Martsinkevich, the group has been using social media, primarily VKontakte
(Russia's Facebook spinoff), to place fake dating ads to lure gay men. Once
face-to-face with the men, group members interrogate and torture them, and a
video of the encounter is put on YouTube. Here's one such video from late July.
(Warning: The content of the video is disturbing.)
Disturbing?
My word would be gut-wrenching.
Nor
is it just in Russia—hate crimes are on the rise in New York City, where
gangs are attacking gay people in broad daylight in places such as Madison
Square Garden. Check out the video below.
What’s the worst thing?
Let me tell
you a little secret. When I worked at Wal-Mart, there were two people who spent
an hour or two reading the newspapers and listening to morning radio. It was
called “corporate communications,” and the idea was simple—monitor the buzz and
hit back when necessary.
If that was
little Puerto Rico, do you think the international sponsors of this 50 billion
dollar event being held in Sochi, Russia next year were unaware of this
controversy? Here’s
what one writer has to say:
"This
piece of legislation worked its way up through the legislative system," Minky Worden, HRW's
Director of Global Initiatives, told me in an interview
(listen to the full interview below). "The International Olympic
Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, the so-called top corporate
sponsors -- Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble -- these companies all,
as [HRW] did, tracked the progress of this law."
"And
because it is so clearly in complete violation of the Olympic Charter,"
she continued, "it's also clear to us at Human Rights Watch that if any of
the major Olympic stakeholders who have a hotline to the Kremlin -- because the
Olympics are very important to Putin personally, he has a deputy prime
minister, [Dmitry] Kozak,
who is tasked with making them come off perfectly -- that if any of the Olympic
stakeholders, the sponsors who are literally paying for the Games, or the
International Olympic Committee, the U.S. Olympic Committee or the other
Olympic committees, if they weighed in on this, I don't think this law would
have been signed by Putin or passed by the Duma.
If they had leaned on [Russia] before the law was signed, it would not have
been signed. That is absolutely true."
Let’s head
back up to the top. A Swedish athlete is dissing all of Mother Russia by
displaying her rainbow fingernails?
Screw
that—move the damn games to Vancouver, and I’ll start eating Big Macs again….
