Well more St Petersburg, which as well as wanting to be a #1 tourist destination has just passed a Clause 28 type law banning all homosexual propaganda – yes censorship. In fact it sounds exactly like Section 28 and yes the usual emotive straw man of ‘please won’t you think of the children!’ is being used here as well, if the trolls on the video are anything to go by.
And I suspect like Section 28 there will be a freezing effect on sex education or any outreach or social work for teenagers, leaving all children but especially LGBT tenns completely alone. And it also contains that old homophobic suggestion that gay men and women are predatory towards children, that ol’ paedophilia gambit which actually isn’t statistically true (most paedophiles are straight, as they would be being more of the population, which the reverse would be true if there was a causal link).
Also their #1 son and thus tourism magnet Tchaikovsky was gay, so I don’t know how that’s going to work unless you ban his own writings and those of his brother, and as a gay artist does that mean his work gets censored too? Not played in schools cos that would be promotion of gayness? Sounds crazy but unfortunately all these laws end up with silence, censorship, teachers scared of what they can say or coming out and children sent the message that they should be ashamed of what they are because it must be so bad no-one can even talk about it.
And do I need to say, Silence = Death?
So I’d boycott St Petersburg, and it’s well worth pointing out Russia’s past history isn’t that good for gay rights, such as Moscow pride so I’d also say think again about visiting other places too. Certainly isn’t on my list, along with Dubai, UAE, Abu Dhabi, some of the Carribean and Uganda.
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