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Showing Original Post only (View all)Putin Claims 'Gay Nazis' Behind Ukrainian Unrest [View all]
Source: The Advocate
A U.S.-based Russia scholar contends that Vladimir Putin is looking to galvanize support for Russian rule in Ukraine by linking ultranationalist, neo-Nazi values and support for LGBT equality, which Putin frequently laments as a Western phenomenon.
Matthew Schmidt, an assistant professor of national security and political science at the University of Connecticut who holds an MA in Russian studies, told Raycom News Network that Putin has positioned himself as a defender of "traditional values" in his propaganda war with the West," going so far as to claim that "gay Nazis" were responsible for the initial uprising in Kiev, when pro-Ukrainian demonstrators took to the street to oppose the since-deposed pro-Russian regime.
"The gay Nazis label was simultaneously an attempt to tie the new pro-Europe camp in Kiev to the hated German Third Reich while also taking advantage of the growing acceptance of gay marriage in the West, particularly in the United States," reports Raycom.
Massachusetts-based evangelical preacher and noted homophobe Scott Lively whose most notorious book claims that the Nazi Party was run by gay men made the same argument Putin advanced in March, asserting that gay people were responsible for the crisis in Ukraine.
Read more: http://www.advocate.com/world/2014/05/16/putin-claims-gay-nazis-behind-ukrainian-unrest
The Russian president takes a page out of a notorious antigay American evangelical's playbook and claims that gay people are the cause of the current conflict in Ukraine.
The power the LGBT community wields. Who would have thought!