This latest hyperbolic reaction to Russia’s law prohibiting the distribution of homosexuality-related materials to minors has not gone unnoticed by Russian media. On Monday, August 12, Russia’s principal English-language news agency published a piece titled “Russian Jews outraged after Stephen Fry compared gay propaganda ban to Nazi Germany”. After reading the piece, which I found to be balanced in its coverage, I posted it to my Facebook profile page to see what my friends – who span all ends of the political and theological spectrum – had to say about it. According to the piece,
Fry, an openly gay Jewish-British writer, actor, and television host, urged UK Prime Minister David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to boycott the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. The move was in response to a recently adopted Russian law which prohibits the propaganda of homosexuality among minors.
While many of my Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical Protestant friends echoed my observations in support of the general thrust of the article, I was struck by how many of my more politically and theologically liberal friends who commented proceeded to vilify the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church without actually having any understanding as to what the law (to which they vehemently objected) would actually prohibit.
What exactly did Fry say about this law that so offended leaders of Russia’s Jewish communities? His words speak for themselves. In this August 7 open letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee, Fry accused Putin of “making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews”. The actor directly compared the Russian President with the Nazi dictator, stating that Putin “is eerily repeating the insane crime” of Hitler, only in this instance, enabling the direction of violence “this time against LGBT Russians”.
Mockingly postulating that “Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov”, the United Russia party official whom Fry personally confronted in St Petersburg, he then lauded the controversial Emperor Peter I of Russia as “Peter the Great”, insinuating that this tsar was some kind of philosopher with an ideal vision to transform and modernize Russia through the application of Western cultural norms.
Fry is apparently unaware, or uncritical, of the reality that tens of thousands died under Peter I’s brutal Westernization policies. These included forced internal population transfers, the deliberate expansion of serfdom, the harnessing of a massive forced labor cohort to build his European-style capital on inhospitable, frozen marshland, and tyrannical policies such as forcing all noblemen to shave their beards and conform to Western styles of dress.
It is of course perfectly acceptable if people, whether they are Russian citizens or foreign commentators such as Fry, wish to voice their opposition to a law which they consider unjust. Such discussion is normal and healthy in a democratic society. However, to do as Fry has done and compare a law which he finds distasteful, prejudicial and even despicable to the actions of Hitler, a man who commanded a nearly-successful genocide is, at best, absurdly hyperbolic, and, at worst, deeply offensive to the memory of all victims of the Holocaust. As RT reported, Russia’s Chief Rabbi publicly denounced Fry’s comments.
Russia’s Jewish community said it is outraged by Fry’s rhetoric, calling it a provocation.
“Unfortunately, yet again we see people attempting to use sacred memory about the genocide against the Jews and the Holocaust for their own purposes,” Russia’s Chief Rabbi, Berl Lazar, told ITAR-TASS. He believes that such cynicism insults the memory of millions of people who were murdered during World War II “because of their nationality and faith.”
The Chief Rabbi emphasized that the gay propaganda ban is in no way aimed at violating the rights of LGBT individuals, but rather serves to protect children “who are open to any kind of influence” from issues surrounding homosexuality.
One might object to the Chief Rabbi’s assertion that this law “serves to protect children” from undue adult political influence on their intellectual and psychological formation. One might also disagree vehemently with the law itself, but the reality is that gay people in Russia do not face anything comparable to what Jews faced from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. To state as Mr Fry has that homosexuals in Russia actually face such dangers of systematic persecution speaks either to the comedian’s improper comedic timing here, or his utter insensitivity to the memory of many of his own family relations who perished. As Fry notes in his open letter,
I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler’s anti-Semitism.
Bearing this in mind, that he lost over 12 members of his extended family to the Nazis, does Fry really believe Russia’s gay and lesbian citizens are in danger of facing a new Holocaust? Where does he have reason to believe this to be the case? Homosexual Russians may vote, run for office, enter all professions, purchase whatever they like, travel wherever they desire, attend whatever schools they wish, and live with whomever they want. The Russian state does nothing to infringe upon their basic liberties as citizens.
My liberal and secular friends unfortunately fail to comprehend a crucial distinction that needs to be made when talking about how the Nazis treated Jews (a people whom they set out to systematically marginalize, expel, and ultimately exterminate), and how the Putin government is currently dealing with what it views as attempts by Western powers to impose progressive social values and relativist moral views on Russia, a country undergoing an unprecedented post-Soviet religious reawakening under the aegis of the Orthodox Church.
Beginning most notably with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, the Nazis created laws which effected real legal differences between Gentiles and Jews, effectively consigning the latter into a separate class of people, putting them outside the classifications of citizenship and denying them any real humanity in the eyes of the German state. This legislation ultimately culminated in the attempted extermination of all Jews with an industrially engineered ‘Final Solution’, the result of which, on a scale hitherto unprecedented, was the Holocaust.
Even if one disagrees with the Russian law, one must admit that Russia has not done anything even comparable to the Nazis to its lesbian and gay populations. Self-identified homosexuals in Russia are not, nor will they be made into a separate legal class of people, nor will they face systematic imprisonment, widespread deliberate torture, or mass-scale execution, let alone attempted extermination.
Furthermore, from the moral and theological perspective of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill’s well-known efforts to publicly address the issue of homosexuality focus on trying to encourage the spiritual transformation of people away from what the Church holds to be a spiritually destructive, intrinsically harmful lifestyle. Even if one vehemently rejects the Church’s moral position, as do many of progressives and atheists, one must logically admit that the Church’s position on homosexuality, which emphasizes repentance, healing and transformation in Christ, is fundamentally antithetical to the attempts the Nazis made to quite literally wipe out and exterminate all Jews. The Church, by holding all people to be created in the image of God and possessing inestimable worth, proclaims her fundamental interest in the healing of the sinner. In comparison, the Nazis cared nothing for the dignity, personal uniqueness or humanity of their millions of victims, viewing Jews, homosexuals, and Slavs as subhuman.
One of the Facebook commentators contended that Stephen Fry spoke only “a bit imprecisely”. Is it only “a bit imprecise” to compare a law which simply bans any propagation of any materials about non-traditional sexual lifestyles to minors to a systematic attempt at genocide? Another liberal observer, a United Methodist friend who described himself as “an outsider to both the Jewish and LGBTQ communities”, actually questioned whether or not the Russian law could be seen as heralding the cusp of an imminent wave of systematic mass persecution of Russian homosexuals.
Unlike in Nazi Germany, a state whose very fascist and racist ideology committed it to the initial legal marginalization, then the expulsion and, ultimately, the attempted annihilation of all Jews, there is no evidence whatsoever behind any allegations that gay people in Russia will be subject to the deprivations of all those basic liberties to which Jews were after 1933.
There is simply no historical basis to suggest that Russia is on the verge of seeing a systematic persecution of professed gays and lesbians in any way comparable to the manner in which the Nazis actively and deliberately persecuted the Jews. Putin already served two full terms as Russian President from 2000-2008, more recently stepping aside after 2008 to become prime minister in respect of the constitution’s two-term limit of coterminous service in the presidency. During his first two terms as President, and his 2008-2012 term as prime minister during Dmitri Medvedev’s term as President, no similar pieces of legislation were introduced, while since Putin’s third term began, there have been no laws restricting any basic liberties afforded to all Russian citizens, including those who identify as gay.
While Russian leaders do not care about interfering in what people choose to do in the private sphere of their homes, they have publicly committed to affirming what we in the West would call traditional morality or “Judeo-Christian values”. My liberal friends asked: why is Russian public reaction against any perceived challenges to the traditional way of life so strong? They need only look at recent history: in the wake of the official atheist ideology which governed the Soviet state for over 70 years (in which time the Orthodox Church was savagely persecuted and believers of all faiths faced systematic persecution, torture, transportation and mass executions,) traditional values were ridiculed and constantly undermined by all levels of the state authority.
After 1917, Communism sought to replace Orthodoxy as the nation’s unifying cultural and, in a perverse way, spiritual force. Many in the West fail to understand just how traumatic the Soviet period was to the millions of believers who suffered all levels of privation, ridicule, torture and systematic persecution. Given this historical context, it is all the more remarkable that Russia today is undergoing a period of religious revitalization quite unlike any other in modern history. In this atmosphere, in which millions of people are still to varying degrees recovering from the trauma of the Soviet purges and the chaos of the post-Soviet 1990s, it is the collective national patrimony, of which Orthodoxy is at the very heart, which most Russians, however observant they themselves may or may not be, seek to ensure is never again overthrown and nearly wiped out.
From our Western cultural perspective, this current attitude in Russian society may seem hyperbolic or even hysterical, but perhaps this is because we cannot relate to the near eradication of our main unifying cultural ideals – though I suspect that, whenever we are speaking of liberals and conservatives, secular progressives and Christian traditionalists, we do not even agree as to what those ideals actually are.
Russia has always been, and likely will continue to be a strongly centralized semi-authoritarian state; this word authoritarian is a crucial distinction: it is no longer totalitarian as it was under Stalin. Thus , while homosexuality is decriminalized, permitted in private in Russian society, publicly Russian society is largely voicing itself as opposed to any sort of normalization or broader affirmation of homosexual relations in the way we have seen in Western countries. This is above all indicative of profoundly different cultural norms and attitudes between a consciously tradition-minded Russia and an increasingly (Christian tradition)-rejecting West. Whereas Western societies increasingly give priority to individual liberty in all its expressions against those hitherto prevailing societal norms rooted in natural law, Russia ultimately prioritizes social stability and traditional cultural and societal values over certain expressions of individual personal liberty.
My liberal friends argued that the propaganda law criminalized simply talking about homosexuality. This interpretation struck me as extraordinary, that anyone should think the Russian government so absurd as to attempt to curtail freedom of speech in this way. What has been criminalized is simply the distribution to minors of any materials which challenge or demean heterosexual lifestyles or seek to promote homosexual lifestyles. Ten Russian states have already passed such restrictions since 2006. Under the new federal law, ‘gay pride parades’, for instance, will now be forbidden from taking place in close proximity to primary schools.
It is crucial for liberals to recognize that homosexual activity is not being criminalized in Russia; it was in fact decriminalized in 1993 following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Those progressives whose ideological roots are ultimately Marxist, and, by default, the official ‘Marxist-Leninism’ espoused by the Soviet state, should realize that it was the Soviet Union, not tsarist Russia, which was one of the first states to deliberately criminalize homosexuality for politically ideological reasons.
The Nazis actually imitated the Soviets in this regard. Since homosexual relations are naturally closed to the creation of new life, the Soviets viewed them as symptomatic of bourgeoisie decadence incompatible with socialism and Marxist-Leninist values. Soviet propaganda disparaged wealthy bourgeois “capitalists” who had the “luxury” of indulging in homosexual relationships which the Soviet state saw not as morally sinful as the Tsarist state had, but (worse in Soviet eyes) absolutely useless to the state.
The reality is that, as much as my liberal and progressive friends despise him, President Putin has not encouraged or expressed support for violence of any kind toward gays or lesbians. That he should speak out in favor of traditional marriage is both self-evident given how culturally conservative Russian society is, and also considering that such a defense of marriage is in accordance with Russian federal law. Where Western liberals see an implied license for hateful mobs to attack and slaughter gay people, they betray their fundamental ignorance of Russian political culture and society. That Putin should do as he has and express, in secular language, support for traditional marriage which naturally leads to an increase in the Russian population should surprise no one. The core difference in the use of language by Presidents Obama and Putin regarding this issue is above all a natural consequence of the widening cultural chasm between the increasingly secular or post-Christian West and the traditional, increasingly Christian Russian society.
One of the things I realized as my exchange with my progressive and atheist friends went on is that they have no understanding of the beautiful Orthodox Christian belief of marriage as a sacred Mystery, a sacramental reality which transfigures and transforms both husband and wife into one entity. Like the Roman Catholic Church, evangelical Protestantism and even Mormonism, Orthodoxy affirms that any sexual relationships outside marriage are a misuse of the divine gift of sexuality. Logically, this exhortation to chastity applies to unmarried heterosexual couples as much as to any homosexual people.
Orthodox theology understands marriage as an icon imaging Christ the Bridegroom and His eternal Bride the Church. As a result, marriage is only possible in the Church between a man and a woman. We believe it is a Mystery which gives God’s grace to the husband and wife, who are symbolically crowned as King and Queen of a new family unit. For us, marriage is a holy undertaking, a kind of martyrdom (from the Greek word μάρτυς for ‘witness’) which unites a couple for this life and the next in a bond of selflessness, deep love and mutual devotion. Of course we believe people are free to choose to live however they wish, and the Church does not expect those living outside her bounds to live by her moral life.
One area with which I heartily agreed with my liberal friends is that we rejected as entirely unacceptable any deliberate mob or mass violence which targets homosexual activists. Such attacks are incompatible with any notion of the rule of law. While I don’t believe that the federal law banning any propagation to minors of materials supporting non-traditional sexual relations is an inherent threat to the basic liberties of homosexuals in Russia, the Orthodox Church hierarchs should not shrink from condemning those acts of violence which have taken place in Moscow, Tbilisi and St Petersburg against unarmed gay protesters.
I have a deep respect for Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill and especially Patriarch Ilia of Georgia, but I do not see how their condemning the incidents of violent attack on unarmed gay protesters would do anything other than encourage the healing of those who were unjustly attacked, and facilitate their possible conversion of heart away from a spiritually destructive lifestyle. Silence in this situation could be very spiritually harmful to all those affected. In any society which affirms even basic rule of law and restraint of violence, it follows that the majority cannot expose a minority to its violent whims. Thus, my conscience as an Orthodox believer moves me to condemn the May 17 attacks in Tbilisi, on which all international media reported, in which Georgian Orthodox priests led a mob of thousands in brutalizing gay activists.
For the sake of the Church’s mission as well as the healing of those who were wrongfully assaulted, Church hierarchs should condemn the Tbilisi attack as utterly without legal defense. It is shameful to me as an Orthodox believer that Georgian priests somehow persuaded themselves that these actions were acceptable in their role as clergymen. While I support the federal law in Russia, and do not believe that the chronological correlation between the passage of such laws and incidents of violence automatically proves causation, unless these attacks are condemned, it will be far too easy for liberals and progressives here to vilify the Orthodox Church, whose teachings they already reject, whose revitalization in the former Soviet bloc they decry as only possible through corruption, and whose mission to bring people to repentance and new life in Christ they heartily oppose.
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