Novye Izvestia sums up the first results of Prohibition of LGBT propaganda

Novye Izvestia sums up the first results of the innovations, and together with experts they try to figure out how the law works and how it is interpreted "above" and "below".

Victoria Pavlova

Officials and business did not wait for the appearance of law enforcement practice and the decision of the courts, which will decide what and in what situation is propaganda and what is not. Waiting is more expensive. Everyone thought that it was much more profitable to simply agree with the rules of the game.

Society also does not sleep, and stands guard over spiritual bonds: today, vigilant citizens accused the Respublika bookstore of promoting LGBT to the Moscow police - allegedly, the store's website contains materials promoting LGBT.

Such different propaganda and such different traditions

LGBT propaganda, according to legislators, acts destructively on society and becomes a threat to the demographic situation in the country. To resist gay propaganda in Russia, according to officials, should be "traditional Russian spiritual and moral values." And so that no one doubts that we have these values, they were spelled out in presidential decree No. 809 (signed on November 9, 2022). The promotion of non-traditional sexual relations in this decree is on a par with the activities of extremist and terrorist organizations.

But it turned out that everyone has their own propaganda.

It turns out, based on the explanations of our legislators, according to the law, it is now possible for us to bring under the article almost any demonstration and mention of LGBT people, because in the songs of Tatu there is not a word about how good it is to have a non-traditional orientation...

There is a decision of the Constitutional Court, which decided that only family relations that lead to procreation, “in their traditional understanding, taken from the ancestors” are of value. Any other relationship is non-traditional, which means it is akin to terrorism. If we follow the letter of the law, then the cohabitation of a heterosexual couple faced with infertility is also a non-traditional relationship (natural procreation is impossible), which, despite the prohibition of discrimination, cannot be socially equivalent to “traditional”.

Experts, especially those who are directly involved in the LGBT agenda, have many questions about the traditions adopted from their ancestors. One of them, for example, claims that there can be no traditions coming from the depths of centuries:

- Tradition is certain norms and values that are passed down from generation to generation. Anthropologists and historians have known for a long time that there are no ancient traditions, and the maximum age of any tradition is about 3 generations. Further into the depths of centuries, norms and values are not transmitted, because the living conditions of people and their behavior change. Therefore, not everything that was once can be called tradition and traditional value. If we are talking about Russia (before the revolution), then it was a class society and each class had its own traditions and codes of conduct - the nobles, the bourgeoisie, etc. Therefore, the concept of "Russian spiritual and moral values" is an absolute fake.

Traditional values that do not exist

There are also big problems with the interpretation of traditional values (note - in a secular state, which Russia is so far). Here is how Russian officials see these values:

Experts are trying to clarify. Candidate of Sciences in Sociology, ex-head of the Sexuality Research Laboratory, senior lecturer at the School of Sociology at University College Dublin Alexander Kondakov points to the confusion in the minds of those in power.

- Often deputies refer family relations to traditional relations. But such attitudes are common in all societies of the world. Moreover, in many of them they are much more integrated into the social fabric than in Russia. In the Russian Federation, there are many divorces, and families are not formed as intensively as in many countries of the conditional West - from Ireland and Sweden to Italy and Greece. Yes, and there are more children in these countries today than in Russian families. Somewhere this is the result of somewhat outdated family practices - you can call them "traditions" - as in Ireland, where the norm is still to have many children, sometimes more than three, as was the case in the 1950s in the USSR. And somewhere, as in Sweden, this is the result of new family norms, when women already emancipated by state feminism feel secure at work, secure in the sense of a guaranteed independent income, see that the children's infrastructure works well, and decide to have more children than the previous one. generation. Russia in this sense is a bad example of following any traditions if they are understood as family norms and practices.

It turns out that it is not a demonstration of non-traditional relationships that leads to strong families and an increase in the birth rate, but material well-being? Birth statistics confirm this: in the USSR, the birth rate has been declining since the mid-twentieth century and during the late shortage dropped to a modest 13.4 babies per 1000 inhabitants, after the collapse of the USSR it collapsed to 9.3 babies per 1000, faced another wave of decline after the 1998 crisis year, and now there is a reduction that began in 2014. At the same time, in 1993, the article for “sodomy” was decriminalized, and since 2014, a law has been in force to ban LGBT children’s propaganda. Something doesn't add up.

But since the government is so fond of appealing to the traditions of their ancestors, then in the next article of "NI" we will figure out whose traditions the government is now protecting. Spoiler alert: not Russian at all.