The gay test images
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The patriarch’s insistence that the war in Ukraine is all about gay parades reminded me of a brilliant Russian-language poem someone shared with me on Twitter the other day, written by Russian-Ukrainian poet Artem Polezhaka in late 2013 and titled “ Reportage.” The poem hilariously spoofs state-owned Russian television’s hysterical reporting on the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv: the reporter breathlessly recounts the increasingly grotesque horrors he supposedly witnesses-a mélange that features neo-Nazis, jihadists, looters, cannibals, and Jews who “drink Christian babies’ blood by the bucket”-but keeps coming back to gay orgies.
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The patriarch also asserted that resistance to such demands is “suppressed by force,” which amounts to “forcible imposition of a sin condemned by divine law” and which means that the war for Ukraine is “not a physical but a metaphysical struggle.” (Ironically, the patriarch used the forbidden word “war” rather than the prescribed “special operation” but, unlike media outlets critical of the government, he is not in danger of getting canceled by Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media oversight agency.) He did, however, return more than once to the evil of gay parades and to his claim that holding such parades was a requirement for membership in the “club” of powerful countries. Roe has been vulnerable because it’s been about individual rights, and not the scope of…ĭuring his fifteen-minute sermon on the Eastern Orthodox holiday known as Forgiveness Sunday (the last day before Lent), the patriarch did not say a word about fellow Christians under fire in Ukraine outside Eastern Donbas. Surely even religious believers who frown on gay pride parades should agree that kidnapping and torturing people is worse. Human Rights Watch has reported that the Moscow-backed “armed groups” that rule the region frequently detain people on bogus charges of espionage or treason and that detainees, including pregnant women, have been “held incommunicado, in appalling conditions,” denied medical care, and in some cases tortured. Freedom is nonexistent even by the standards of Putin’s Russia (Freedom House gives Eastern Donbas a “ freedom rating” of 4 out of 100, ahead of only North Korea, Syria, Tibet, Turkmenistan, and South Sudan. The demand to hold a gay parade is in fact a test for loyalty to that powerful world, and we know that if people or countries resist this demand, they are excluded from that world and treated as alien.Īlternatively, one could say that “what exists in the Donbas” is an enclave ruled by armed gangs of separatists controlled by shadowy people with likely ties to the FSB, the Russian state security service. Do you know what that test is? It’s very simple but also horrific: it’s a gay parade. Today, there is a certain test for loyalty to that power, a certain pass into that “happy” world, the world of excessive consumption, the world of illusory freedom. What exists in the Donbas is a rejection, a principled rejection of the so-called values that are now being offered by those who lay claim to global domination. The patriarch-who, it should be noted, began his clerical career in the Soviet era when the church was a loyal handmaiden to the atheistic state and who was reportedly a KGB agent, like the rest of the church hierarchy-summed up the situation as follows:įor eight years, there have been efforts to destroy what exists in the Donbas. But in a Sunday sermon, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, offered a startling new explanation that is sure to resonate with the Sohrab Ahmari wing of the modern American right: It was to save Eastern Ukraine from the gays. In the past ten days, plenty of rationalizations have been offered for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine-everything from “Russia needs a buffer state to keep NATO at a distance” ( just about every Kremlin apologist) to “Russia is trying to ‘denazify’ Ukraine” (just about no one except Putin and his minions).