Belief

In June 2013, the Russian Duma passed a law making ‘homosexual propaganda directed toward children’ illegal. Some days later, it passed another law making it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt children. In response to criticism of these laws, President Vladimir Putin claimed: ‘We don’t have a ban on non-traditional sexual relations. We have a ban on promoting homosexuality and paedophilia among minors’ (BBC Online 2014). Some have argued that attitudes in Russia towards gay and lesbian rights have been partly shaped by the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2007, in an address to the Council of Europe, Patriarch Aleksii, the then leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, argued that homosexuality was a sickness and a sin (Anderson 2012). Patriarch Kirill, his successor, has made similar statements. He has criticized the efforts of the European Court of Human Rights, an organ of the Council of Europe of which Russia is a member, to protect the rights of gays and lesbians. He has gone even further than this, stating:

This [homosexuality] is a very dangerous apocalyptic symptom, and we must do everything in our powers to ensure that sin is never sanctioned in Russia by state law, because that would mean that the nation has embarked on a path of self-destruction. (Manson 2013)