Before you decide to down-vote me into oblivion and accuse me of hating minority groups please read the white paper linked above. Note I am not affiliated with the person who wrote it or scribd. I just want people to see both sides of the argument.
EDIT - And what a surprise down-voted. Seriously did anyone clicking the down arrow actually read the paper? Considering how long it is and that this post is 5 minutes old I seriously doubt it.
Still reading, but impressions on the intro and first chapter: what a totally bizarre paper. It's a "white paper", but it's written as an autobiographical narrative of his research process. And usually "Executive Summary" does not refer to a top 10 list.
It's very obviously written for the purposes of advocacy, despite protestations that it's not. The defense of this law seems to be:
1) It's not that bad. It doesn't target the LGBT community, it just bans any sort of public acknowledgement of a class of people that just happens to include LGBT folks.
2) The media has blown this way out of proportion by saying what the law only implies. Also by not mentioning that the law was enacted to protect the children. Why don't they mention the children?
3) Even if the law is that bad, it hasn't been enforced much yet.
4) Even if the law is bad, those guys over there are just as bed.
Oh yeah, definitely want to consider both sides of this argument.
Just out of curiosity, boyter. When you refer to "both sides", how would you sum up the other side in one sentence? "It's not that bad" is not, in fact, a defense of anything.
"Would the US government and news media (all owned by multinational conglomerates) implement a enormous propaganda campaign demanding the repeal of Russian Federation Federal Law No. 135-FZ because of the potential revenue loss a company in violation could incur with a 90 day suspension resulting in lower than projected revenues leading to a negative impact on the company’s stock price and ultimately causing a negative impact on key US economic indicators?"
"With all that in mind, we can conclude that the only accurate, fact-based, logical answer to the question is YES"
Wow, just wow.
This guy is a nutjob. He argues with a straight face that the Russian law isn't targeting the LGBT community, just non-traditional sexual relationships. He's either a liar about his long involvement in the LGBT community or he's learned absolutely nothing from it, as it's classic couching of terms as cover.
He even brings up the (unenforceable) anti-sodomy laws in US states, discussing how the majority of them are actually written to outlaw sodomy (non-vaginal intercourse) between any two people, not just same-sex couples, but they were used as tools to specifically target homosexual long after they were no longer (or rarely) enforced against heterosexual people. And yet he can't seem to connect the dots.
In any case, this goes from infuriating to fucking stupid pretty quickly. Check out the pages culminating in the conclusion I quoted above on page 70.
I agree that the conclusions are odd, however the material presented is what I am interested in. You can draw your own conclusions from there rather then from what the media is telling us.
One sentence?
"The law in its current form is an improvement over what existed before."
BTW I shouldn't have used the phrase "both sides". What I mean is we should not get caught up in the media's interpretation of the law. My mistake there and sorry for the confusion.
My referring to the "not that bad" is to way its being presented by the media.
I can see how advocating for equality can be listed as a crime based on what's listed in the law. It's interesting that the word "propaganda" is used which leaves a fair amount of room for interpretation. Point 3 is the sore point it seems, although I can see why its in there as you would not want to equate "child-adult" relationships which this would prevent. It all hangs on the word "nontraditional".
That Russia has a reasonable political platform regarding its LGBT citizens? I am not sure that it is possible to 'blow out of proportion' what is most certainly a human rights issue. This was your own assertion, not that of the paper's.
The topic was the Google Doodle showing support for LGBT people and your first impulse is to imply that the situation in Russia is in fact a non-issue.
I didn't say it was a non-issue. I said it was overblown. The current media coverage of the issue is overblown. I belive I am being down-voted because this is a sensitive issue. Anyone suggesting that perhaps its not as bad as it seems is instantly shouted down.
Please, please, please read the linked white paper. It is well researched, well written and provides citations and sources to its conclusions. It is also written by a lawyer who identifies themselves as part of the LGBT community.
If nothing else, scroll down and read the translation of the Russian Federation law in there (the only good version I could find) and really think on what it means to the individual.
You were bemoaning being downvoted, and I explained why.
I was commenting on the context which you provided inside of your original comment. If you actually don't care or don't wonder why such a comment would be downvoted, then disregard my post(s).
I was complaining about being down-voted over what was obviously an emotional response to a sensitive topic since it was so swift. I think that is a reasonable thing to complain about.
I expected to be down-voted. I was also hoping that there would be enough people around with an objective point of view to read the paper and provide solid cited counter arguments.
I hold no stake in this. I am neither Russian or part of the LGBT community. I am interested in human rights, and I want equal opportunities for all regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender or otherwise. Torch and pitchfork attacks are not the way to achieve this.
> That Russia has a reasonable political platform regarding its LGBT citizens?
Are you saying that this position can simply be disregarded out of hand? That strikes me as disrespectful and self-important. If nothing else it is non-conducive to any actual discussion on the matter - unless all you want is an echo chamber to reaffirm your preexisting positions on the matter.
> The topic was the Google Doodle showing support for LGBT people
Specifically in relation to the LGBT issues surrounding the Olympics, i.e., Russia's "anti-gay" laws. The Russian laws are very much a part of this topic. You're being disingenuous.
Absolutely I am. I don't need to share the evidence with you because, as a thinking and contributing member to these forums, I am sure you have accessed it yourself. Is there any reason I wouldn't discard an argument in favor of institutionalized racism? Or, more mildly, that institutionalized racism is a topic that is capable of being overblown?
The commenter called it "The LGBT Russia thing" and if that does not aptly sum up how trivial s/he perceives the topic to be, I don't know what does. "That human rights violation thing". Sorry, it doesn't fly with me.
I am not saying Russian laws are not a part of the topic. What I am saying is that characterizing the topic as being "overblown" by citing that paper is absolutely ludicrous.
EDIT: Wanted to add in this: How do you have 'rational discourse' when one side of the discussion is demonstrably pursuing nothing less than a human rights violation? It is like saying the Catholic church's sex scandal was 'overblown', or slavery, or any other human rights topic you can imagine. Where is the rational discourse there? How can "human rights violations" ever be an "overblown" topic?
I'm sorry, this paper is bizarre and somewhat incoherent. magicalist goes into some of the problems with it, but the even larger problem that I see is that it seems to completely ignore the larger climate of intimidation and erasure by public officials, and look at "are specific people being harmed by this specific law", and I'm disinclined to trust its analysis even on that.
It's written by somebody who claims to be a journalist and managing editor yet has basically zero online presence in bylines or anything that I can find. Nor does he provide any contact information (apart from being from Chicago, which, good for him, I guess?). That makes very little sense.
In the US at large, LGBT rights and support for them has been growing, imperfectly and inconsistently, but growing. In Russia, it seems that there's been a backlash, and Putin and company are stirring up public sentiment against LGBT people. I'll take the word of Russians that things are actively getting worse:
I read the executive summary. It's great that Russia is making legal progress, and I mean that, but that doesn't change the situation on the ground where people are being beaten and arrested.
The paper also talks about statistics on how often gay people are beaten in Russia. United States is far worse in this respect. Further United States has a greater incarceration rate for gays than Russia.
The Russian search engine? I'm not sure what you mean.
My comment references a Russian propaganda technique of brushing off human rights violation accusations by saying "Yeah well, the US is shitty", as though that excuses them. I suppose Yandex could in theory be used to distribute this form of propaganda, I don't really know much about them.
I get that. I just don't see how it's relevant in a thread about Russia's laws. There's progress to be made and progress to be celebrated all over the world.
Thank you for linking to this. Finally someone taking the time to actually discuss the law and its consequences rather than rehashing the same breathless bs that is printed and repeated in the media.
I expected to get voted down. Not because what I posted didn't add value, but because this is the sort of topic I avoid in day to day conversation because it causes fights. There is too much emotion involved.
I am not saying there are not problems. I am saying that the media coverage of it is overblown, and because of that any rational thought or discussion about it is impossible. I provided a link to a document which as I pointed out elsewhere is well written, researched, provides citations and has some reasonable conclusions.
I understand it is hard to remove emotion from this sort of topics, in much the same way that discussions on climate change rapidly spiral out of control.
I had hoped that HN was beyond being a vote brigade and that posting it would produce some reasonable discussion on the topic.
No, it's not emotion in this case. The paper you linked begins with 100 repetitions of "did you know that the law actually is about children?". To which I have to answer: yes. And more importantly: yes, of course. That (hiding anti-gay legislation behind supposedly anti-pedophilia legislation) is a known strategy. It's actually one of the most disgusting things about this kind of legislation because it sends a message of "the state approves of using gay and pedophile interchangeably". Also the article seems to suggest that everyones afraid of all gay people getting arrested in Russia now. That's not at all the issue. What people (afaik) are afraid of is citizen-on-citizen violence against gay people getting an official stamp of approval. Because hunting pedophiles is protecting children. Please read the following section a couple of times:
> Public actions designed to promote pedophilia, sexual relations with minors,pederasty, lesbianism and bisexuality shall be prohibited.
You see what is missing? Gay. Lesbian? Bisexual? In there. Gay not. Why? The subtext is: it's implied by either pedophilia or pederasty. Yes, those are techniques you find also among American conservatives fighting gay rights. But you know what? Those images and stereotypes can be found all over the world, for centuries at least. But making laws that turn those stereotypes official? Yeah, that's a problem. Not the people being convicted by those laws. The precedence such laws create.
Sorry I disagree. This topic is highly emotional. That's why this thread was identified as a flame war by HN and why there is so much heated discussion.
I agree that there is lots of legislation which uses anti-pedophilia as a way of passing though "Won't somebody please think of the children!" works, and that's why it is used. I disagree with it of course, but yes I am aware of it.
Wait you are saying that by deliberately excluding "gay" then its implied? Sorry but that's a bit of a stretch which I disagree with.
Look, as far as I can tell this law can be boiled down to "We don't want people to force non-traditional marriage beliefs on minors". The specifics of it have issues. I can see how advocating for equality can be listed as a crime based on what's listed there though. Its interesting that the word "propaganda" is used which leaves a fair amount of room for interpretation. Point 3 is the sore point it seems, although I can see why its in there as you would not want to equate child-adult relationships which this would prevent. It all hangs on the word "nontraditional" and "propaganda".
I have to ask, what did I write that was not reasonable? I can only assume "blown out of proportion" but I have yet to see evidence to the contrary that the media has not done this.
I agree with you and I want to add that in my view, the idea of something which is so clearly a front-and-center human rights issue, cannot easily be "overblown". Violence against people, discrimination, hate-based crimes - these are all things which rate fairly high on the "worth covering" scale of news media.
> It is well researched, well written and provides citations and sources to its conclusions.
First, this white paper is horribly written in comparison to a real research paper or academic report. It seems to be written for the audience of a site such as Infowars, which, not surprisingly, is one of the main sites that have promoted this white paper.[1]
Second, I was mostly interested in the author's comparison of the rates of hate crimes committed against LGBT people in Russia and the US. Not surprisingly, the author simply compares rates reported by the SOVA Center and the FBI. Anyone who has studied criminology for five minutes knows that you can't adequately compare the levels of crime in different areas this way. The American Society of Criminology, the largest criminological association in the world, has stated this numerous times in their publications, including their policy statements[2] (which strongly recommend against using Unified Crime Reports (UCRs) to compare levels of crime in different cities that are located IN THE SAME COUNTRY).
> It is also written by a lawyer who identifies themselves as part of the LGBT community.
Yes, and Bjørn Lomborg is a lifelong environmentalist, which I also learned at Infowars.
The only mention of Brian M. Heiss, the author of the white paper, anywhere on the Internet[3][4] is this white paper. Please direct me to this author, which should be easy since he's apparently your favorite source regarding this issue. I would never cite a source whose existence I couldn't prove.
> Letting the media tell you what to think
Are Amnesty International[5] and Human Rights Watch[6] "the media"?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/203382931/Russian-Lgbt-Law-White-P...
Before you decide to down-vote me into oblivion and accuse me of hating minority groups please read the white paper linked above. Note I am not affiliated with the person who wrote it or scribd. I just want people to see both sides of the argument.
EDIT - And what a surprise down-voted. Seriously did anyone clicking the down arrow actually read the paper? Considering how long it is and that this post is 5 minutes old I seriously doubt it.