Russians Protest Plan to Criminalize Gays
PlanetOut,
April 29, 2002
By Jon ben Asher, 365Gay.com
SUMMARY: Russian gays wearing concentration camp uniforms with pink
triangles demonstrated in Moscow on Friday to protest against legislation that
would make outlaw gay sex.
MOSCOW—Russian gays wearing concentration camp
uniforms with pink triangles demonstrated in Moscow on Friday, to protest
against legislation that would make gay sex punishable by jail terms.
The People’s Deputy Party on Tuesday introduced a bill in the Duma that
would amend the criminal code by making sex between two men or two women a
criminal offense punishable by up to five years in prison.
Homosexual sex was decriminalized after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Proposing the reinstatement of the law, the head of the Deputy Party’s
parliamentary group, Gennady Raikov, said homosexuality was "an
abnormality, and abnormality should be punishable by law."
The measure is reportedly backed by Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Duma’s
international relations committee, but a wide range of politicians have
angrily condemned it.
The concentration camp uniforms were aimed at making explicit the
comparison with Nazi Germany, which forced Jews in countries under its control
to wear yellow stars, and gays to wear pink triangles. More than six million
Jews, gays, Gypsies, and Communists were executed by the Nazis.
"The penalization of homosexuality existed during the authoritarian
regimes of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany," said the head of the
liberal Radical Party, Nikolai Kramov, one of the rally’s organizers.
"It’s only left now … to demand the re-establishment of the death
penalty for homosexuals to be completely in line with Hitler’s ideas,"
he added.
[Home] [World] [Russia]
