Photo via @mjluxmoore/Twitter
March 7, 2022, 3:07 pm*
Russian Orthodox bishop Kirill, the official Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, came out with a rather wild claim about “the West” during a sermon, saying that Western nations commit genocide upon other countries that refuse to hold gay pride parades. No, really.
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“If humanity recognizes that sin is not a violation of God’s law, if humanity agrees that sin is one of the options for human behavior, then human civilization will end there,” he said. “And gay parades are designed to demonstrate that sin — is one of the variations of human behavior. That is why in order to enter the club of those countries, it is necessary to hold a gay pride parade.”
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“And we know how people resist these demands and how this resistance is suppressed by force,” he continued. “This means that we are talking about imposing by force a sin condemned by God’s law, and therefore, by force to impose on people the denial of God and His truth.”
Just to be clear, gay pride parades are not a prerequisite for joining NATO or any other international alliance that we have personally heard of. Also, we can’t wait to hear U.S. right-wing Christians echoing this exact sentiment in the coming weeks without crediting the source.
Kirill seemed to suggest that Ukraine was a nation with strong LGBTQ+ rights, but that is not particularly true on a global scale. Same-sex partners do not enjoy the same rights as different-sex couples in Ukraine, with their constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman and same-sex marriages remaining officially unrecognized and couples barred from adopting children. For trans people, obtaining gender-affirming care is technically possible but difficult, and being transgender is still described as a psychiatric condition in the country.
Furthermore, NATO includes nations with a poor track record on LGBTQ+rights. Neighboring nations to Ukraine like Poland are currently coming under metaphorical fire for barring trans Ukrainian refugees from entering their countries because their gender presentation doesn’t match the gender marker on their identification.
In response to Kirill, a math teacher and former sports reporter who fled the Soviet Union as a refugee in 1991, Slava Malamud, wrote a lengthy Twitter thread on the general sentiments about the West felt by many pro-Putin Russians currently.
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First off, let’s make one thing clear: nobody in Russia seriously believes anymore that Putin is on a noble, selfless mission to rid the world of Nazism (even if in their minds “Nazism” means “opposing Russia”).
No. The prevailing emotion of pro-Putin Russians is anger. Rage. pic.twitter.com/61L4IXhLmI— Slava Malamud
(@SlavaMalamud) March 6, 2022
“They are angry that the Soviet Union was destroyed in 1991 (by Jews and Americans, natch) and replaced with a lawless capitalistic free-for-all that left everyone but a tiny elite indigent and disillusioned. The 1990s are the bugaboo that kept Putin’s support high all these years,” writes Malamud. “Russians blame the horrors of the 1990s on democracy and, by extension, reject all other Western values, especially tolerance, diversity & personal freedoms. Instead, they have rolled the clock all the way back to Nicholas I, to the old triad of ‘monarchy, Orthodoxy, nationality.’”
He made sure to note that this doesn’t describe all Russians or all Russian people who have gripes with the U.S. and other Western nations.
Kirill’s sentiments in particular come in direct contradiction that of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, who condemned Russia’s actions in no uncertain terms.
“In Ukraine, rivers of blood and tears are flowing,” Francis said on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square. “This is not just a military operation but a war which sows death, destruction and misery.”
*First Published: March 7, 2022, 3:02 pm
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