Blaming the Ukraine Invasion on ... the Gays?
How the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, a Putin enabler, spins the war.
In the past ten days, plenty of rationalizations have been offered for Vladimir Putinās invasion of Ukraineāeverything from āRussia needs a buffer state to keep NATO at a distanceā (just about every Kremlin apologist) to āRussia is trying to ādenazifyā Ukraineā (just about no one except Putin and his minions). 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.
The patriarchāwho, 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 hierarchyāsummed up the situation as follows:
For eight years, there have been efforts to destroy what exists in the Donbas. 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. Today, there is a certain test for loyalty to that power, a certain pass into that āhappyā world, the world of excessive consumption, the world of illusory freedom. Do you know what that test is? Itās very simple but also horrific: itās a gay parade. 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.
Alternatively, one could say that āwhat exists in the Donbasā is an enclave ruled by armed gangs of separatists controlled by shadowy people with likely ties to the FSB, the Russian state security service. Freedom is nonexistent even by the standards of Putinās Russia (Freedom House gives Eastern Donbas a āfreedom ratingā of 4 out of 100, ahead of only North Korea, Syria, Tibet, Turkmenistan, and South Sudan. Human Rights Watch has reported that the Moscow-backed āarmed groupsā that rule the region frequently detain people on bogus charges of espionage or treason and that detainees, including pregnant women, have been āheld incommunicado, in appalling conditions,ā denied medical care, and in some cases tortured. Surely even religious believers who frown on gay pride parades should agree that kidnapping and torturing people is worse.
During 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. 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 āclubā of powerful countries. The patriarch also asserted that resistance to such demands is āsuppressed by force,ā which amounts to āforcible imposition of a sin condemned by divine lawā and which means that the war for Ukraine is ānot a physical but a metaphysical struggle.ā (Ironically, the patriarch used the forbidden word āwarā rather than the prescribed āspecial operationā; but, unlike media outlets critical of the government, he is not in danger of getting canceled by Roskomnadzor, Russiaās media oversight agency.)
The patriarchās 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 āReportage.ā The poem hilariously spoofs state-owned Russian televisionās hysterical reporting on the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv: the reporter breathlessly recounts the increasingly grotesque horrors he supposedly witnessesāa mĆ©lange that features neo-Nazis, jihadists, looters, cannibals, and Jews who ādrink Christian babiesā blood by the bucketāābut keeps coming back to gay orgies.
It made me think, too, of fairly common claims by pro-Kremlin conservatives in the United States that the real reason the libs hate Putin and Putinās Russia is the homophobia. Most recently, this argument was trotted out by political commentator Richard Hanania in a Substack post which argued that liberal elites in America had viewed the Putin regime with relative indifference until 2013, when Russia āpassed a law banning gay propaganda towards minorsā (in reality, restricting any gay-themed content in any place where minors could see it, including public events promoting gay rights), and Putin began his transformation into a Hollywood villain.
Were some Western progressives more incensed by Russiaās āgay propagandaā law than by the brutal suppression of peaceful protests, the crushing of the independent media, the election-rigging, and the rest of the Putin regimeās systematic assault on civil liberties? No doubt. But the Putin-loving ātrads,ā in Russia or in Americaābe it Patriarch Kirill, Pat Buchanan, Steve Bannon (who recently praised Putin on his podcast for not being āwokeā and pointed out that āthey donāt have the Pride flagsā in Russia), or Hananiaāare at least as obsessed with the idea of the Putin regime as the nemesis of LGBT rights.
The real irony, perhaps, is that post-Euromaidan Ukraine was not exactly San Francisco. The country still bans same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples, and only about one in five people (similar to the numbers in Russia) believes that homosexuality should be accepted by society. However, for all its problems, Ukraine is sufficiently hospitable to free expression that thousands of people have been able to march under rainbow flags year to yearāin contrast to Russia, where attempts to hold such events have ended in violence from both police and anti-gay vigilantes.
One can debate whether the American liberals and progressives who have decisively won the culture war on gay rights are too intolerant toward people who still subscribe to traditional sexual morality, such as Christian bakers and florists who refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings. But the willingness of quite a few traditionalists to see brutal anti-gay repression as the silver lining of an authoritarian regime rather dramatically illustrates the ugliness at the heart of the ātradā mindset. And Patriarch Kirillās obscene wartime sermon shows us one place where this path leads: the place where the dreaded āgay paradeā is a greater evil than a war of aggression.
