Russian reality check

Russia has become a pariah state with its steady decent into Nazi-style fascism. They don’t deserve to be treated as a normal country, and, as I already said, the Sochi Olympics must be moved, cancelled or boycotted. But, Russia is far from the worst country in the world in terms of the way it treats LGBT people.

The chart above was published on BuzzFeed and shows the 76 countries in which it’s illegal to be gay, including several in which the penalty is death (the article with the chart provides the full details).

These 76 countries are indisputably worse than Russia, as if they’re in a race to be the lowest in humanity’s sewer. The 76 serve as a warning of what Russia will become if the world doesn’t keep up pressure against their vicious anti-gay regime.

But there’s more: The same US evangelical “Christian” who is a driving force behind Uganda’s proposed “kill the gays” bill also cheered Russia’s law, and he claimed credit for promoting the idea. He thinks it should be adopted throughout the world, including the more civilised nations that condemn this sort of inhuman repression. In fact, the anti-gay industry in the USA is universal in singing the praises of Russia, which shows us how much they are the enemies not just of the human rights of LGBT people, but even of freedom and democracy.

So, as we keep pressure on Russia to re-join the family of nations, we must be mindful that it is very, very worse in some countries, and also that some people in the USA’s anti-gay industry want that same—or worse—repression in Western nations, too. This is clearly a much bigger struggle than most people realise. It’s also one we can’t afford to lose.

Update: As an example of non-Russian anti-gay reality, world news outlets like the AP (via Yahoo! News) have been reporting on the brutal July 22 murder of a transgender teen in Jamaica, merely the latest anti-LGBT murder in Jamaica, a country whose homophobic violence problem is so bad that some activists call the country the most dangerous place for LGBT people in the entire Western Hemisphere. In a 2006 report, Human Rights Watch described the situation for LGBT groups in Jamaica as "the worst any of us has ever seen."