Anti Gay and Creating Homophobes is Part of Putin's War-Destructive Plan
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Why anti-gay propaganda has been part of Russia’s strategy against Ukraine from the start. Foreign Policy |
Among Putin’s most vocal and powerful supporters is Patriarch Kirill, the head priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. Those who are drawn to the abundance and freedoms in the West must pass a “specific test of loyalty” to be included in the Western alliance—organize a gay pride parade, Kirill said in a sermon. He has legitimized the war in Ukraine as a holy resistance against a Western plot to impose what the far-right describes as a gender ideology—a pejorative phrase used to describe everything from abortion to sex education in schools to same-sex marriages.
Putin’s public homophobia has a foreign-policy dimension too, hoping to attract support among far-right segments in the United States and Europe, or at the very least exacerbate tensions between liberals and conservatives and between them and their governments.
A mother of two teenagers in an Eastern European nation who is anxious about being next in line of Russian fire said that while she was vehemently against Putin, she agreed with him on the gender debate. “In the West, a girl is being told she can be a boy and a boy that he can be a girl; this is confusing for children,” she told Foreign Policy on the condition of anonymity, worried she might bring undue attention to her children if she identified herself. “Putin is effectively weaponizing these attitudes, but in this regard, I agree with him,” she said.
Putin has long been a hero of the far-right fringe networks in both the United States and Europe. On the eve of Ukraine’s invasion, Steve Bannon, White House chief strategist for part of the Trump administration, praised Putin for being anti-woke. A few days after the invasion, a far-right U.S. network, the America First Political Action Conference, hailed Putin with a round of applause. Roger Köppel, a Swiss politician with the conservative, right-wing populist Swiss People’s Party, has said Putin was vilified because he “stands for manhood” and prophesied that Putin might be the shock the West needs to come back to its senses. Several European leaders in the far-right camp have publicly revealed an affinity for Putin and see an alignment with him when it comes to conservative issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, which they fear challenge heteronormative and cisnormative social organizations.
Activists say over the years Putin has played an instrumental role in exacerbating the culture wars, handing far-right politicians the tools to polarize society for electoral gains. “Putin has managed to take issues that were not marginal per se, but were not issues people would vote on, like the LGBTQ rights, and made them mainstream, high on the political agenda,” said Roberto Muzzetta, a member of Arcigay, an Italian non-governmental organization working on gay rights. “He has created a whole rhetoric package for the Western right-wing movements to win elections. Of course, each political movement used it differently according to social advancement in their respective nations.”
Many Western far-right and Christian conservative figures were keen supporters of Putin when he launched his moral crusade against the West in the early 2010s, Edenborg said. “This was not only about ideological affinity,” he said. “There were actual networking and financial flows between many of these actors, for example in organizations like the World Congress of Families, which gathered U.S. Christian conservatives, European far-right nationalists, and Russian oligarchs.”
But it hasn’t all gone to plan for Putin. Gender and sexuality have become polarizing issues in several Western nations and Putin has tried to accentuate the divisions, but Ukraine’s invasion may have backfired. Many of Putin’s far-right allies in Europe have distanced themselves from the Russian president. France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who famously publicized a handshake with Putin on election posters, has reprimanded him since the invasion and accused him of crossing a red line. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who not very long ago legitimized Putin’s election victory and described it as “the unequivocal will of the Russian people,” has vehemently chastised him for unleashing a war in Ukraine and announced unflinching Italian support for Kyiv.
“Before the war, the far-right European leaders were looking at him as a role model,” Muzzetta said. “But since Ukraine’s invasion, there has been a visible shift. They want to avoid being associated with Putin. … This does not mean their views on the issue have changed, but they are just being careful.”
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