It is no secret that Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s Russia is no fan of the LGBTQ community. In fact, there have been reports of gay people being put in camps in that nation, and it is a very dangerous place for members of that community to be. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that at the G20 Summit, a prominent meeting of world leaders, Putin took the opportunity to both defend himself on the issue and sound off on how other nations are going too far in recognizing the humanity of people who happen to not be straight and/or cisgender.
“I am not trying to insult anyone because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia,” Putin said in an interview with the Financial Times this Friday. “But we have no problem with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish. But some things do appear excessive to us. They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”
Putin sounds like much of the religiously conservative members of the Republican Party here in America — people who realize that their bigotry is no longer popular on the world stage, or even acceptable. However, they have to pander to the segments of the population that are still in the mindset that being LGBTQ is some kind of sin or mental illness, and that the open embracing of the community will destroy so-called “traditional values” or “family values” as we know them.
In the same interview, Putin called American liberal ideology “obsolete.”
“And our Western partners have admitted that some of its points are just unrealistic,” Putin said.
“[Liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades,” he added. “The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”
Featured image via screen grab/TIME Magazine
