No Brokeback in Russia: Moscow Gives Thumbs Down to Gay Pride Parade
TCV ^ | February 19, 2006 | Jim Kouri
 

No Brokeback in Russia: Moscow Gives Thumbs Down to Gay Pride Parade

Jim Kouri February 19, 2006

An opinion poll last year showed 43 per cent of Russians believed gay men should be incarcerated. So it's no surprise that plans to stage Russia's first gay pride parade have been vetoed by Moscow's city government on the grounds that the idea has caused "outrage" in society, according to the European press including the British newspaper The Independent.

Representatives from Moscow's Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's said they city government would not even consider an application for a parade, prompting Russia's gay community to threaten legal action in the European Court of Human Rights, even though Russian is not part of the European Union.

Gay and lesbian groups in Russia continue campaigning for permit to stage the country's first gay pride event on Saturday, May 27. That date commemorates the 13th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia in 1993.

But the gay-lesbian parade coalition's plans have drawn a furious reaction from religious leaders, and it's even been condemned as "suicidal" by other gay activists .

Chief Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin, a leading Islamic cleric in Russia, warned that Muslims would stage violent protests if the march went ahead.

"If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that - Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike ... [The protests] might be even more intense than protests abroad against those controversial cartoons," said Tadzhuddin

The cleric said the Koran taught that homosexuals should be killed because their lifestyle spells the extinction of the human race and said that gays had no human rights.

The Russian Orthodox Church has called it "the propaganda of sin". Bishop Daniil of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk yesterday condemned the plans as a "cynical mockery" and likened homosexuality to leprosy.