From today's WSJ.
While the West implodes with the Leftist Agenda our Enemies are doubling down. All part of the plan my friends!
"MOSCOW—Russia’s parliament passed a bill that expands restrictions on anything perceived as promoting gay issues or same-sex relationships among Russians of all ages, a move that activists say will encourage further hostility toward the country’s already beleaguered LGBT community.
Previous legislation outlawed what authorities called “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” to minors,
introduced in 2013. On Thursday, the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, extended the prohibition to all age groups and introduced new bans on what the legislation calls “propaganda on pedophilia and gender reassignment,” according to information about the bill published by the parliament.
Any act construed to be promoting homosexuality, including through advertising, online or through audiovisual means, could incur a fine of up to 5 million rubles, equivalent to almost $82,000, depending on the category of the violation and whether it is committed by a public figure. A fine of up to 10 million rubles could be leveled for promoting pedophilia and foreign nationals could be expelled from Russia, according to the legislature.
“The decision will help protect our children, the future of the country from the darkness spread by the United States and European states,” Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the State Duma, wrote on his Telegram channel. “We have our own traditions and values.”
The Kremlin has pushed the legislation at a time when it is also attempting to cast its
military campaign in Ukraine as a war against liberal elites, which it says are attempting to destroy what it calls “traditional values,” especially in Russia. Senior Russian officials and the Russian Orthodox church have portrayed gay-rights activism as a symbol of the West’s moral corruption and depravity, which they say is directed at uprooting conservative beliefs in countries such as Russia.
“If Western elites think they can inject into the minds of their people, their societies, strange, in my opinion, newfangled trends like dozens of genders and gay pride parades, then so be it,” Mr. Putin told a foreign-policy forum in October. “Let them do what they want! But what they definitely have no right to do is require others to follow in the same direction,” he said.
Russia’s Federation Council, parliament’s upper house, must approve the bill before it is sent to Mr. Putin to sign into law.
Gay-rights activists decried the new legislation, charging that it essentially “bans the mention of LGBT+ people in media, culture and life,” according to Dilya Gafurova, head of the Sphere Foundation, the legal entity that operates the Russian LGBT Network, which offers support and assistance to LGBT people in Russia.
In a statement on Telegram, she said she anticipates that the gay community will “face a lot of problems: blocking of sites, banning books, regular fines and so on.”
Russia’s LGBT community has long been a target of homophobia and gay people tend to keep a low profile because of widespread animosity. The law passed in 2013 prohibiting so-called “gay propaganda toward minors” was used to justify banning gay-pride events; even waving a rainbow-colored flag could be regarded as breaking the law. Many gay-rights activists have been silenced, gone into hiding or fled the country for fear of unprovoked attacks on them. In 2020, changes to Russia’s constitution defined marriage as a union between a man and woman. Same-sex marriage is outlawed.
Anna Levchenko, a lawyer and psychologist for “Report a Pedophile,” a nongovernmental project that helps victims of pedophilia, criticized the law on Telegram after its first reading in parliament for suggesting that “gays and pedophiles will be one and the same.”
Ms. Gafurova, of the Sphere Foundation, vowed that her organization would continue to “campaign against legislation that violates human rights norms and talk about the problems faced by queer people in Russia.”
“We won’t stop existing,” she said.
A petition published on the website change.org to repeal the so-called “LGBT+ propaganda” law was started in the summer 2021 and has garnered more than 83,000 signatures."
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