Did ukraine tweet invade us if youre gay

But in a Sunday sermon, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, offered a startling new explanation that is sure to resonate with the Sohrab Ahmari wing of the modern American right: It was to save Eastern Ukraine from the gays. The patriarch—who, it should be noted, began his clerical career in the Soviet era when the church was a loyal handmaiden to the atheistic state and who was reportedly a KGB agent, like the rest of church hierarchy—summed up the situation as follows:.

For eight years, there have been efforts to destroy what exists in the Donbas. What exists in the Donbas is a rejection, a principled rejection of the so-called values that are now being offered by those who lay claim to global domination. Do you know what that test is? The demand to hold a gay parade is in fact a test for loyalty to that powerful world, and we know that if people or countries resist this demand, they are excluded from that world and treated as alien.

Surely even religious believers who frown on gay pride parades should agree that kidnapping and torturing people is worse. During his fifteen-minute sermon on the Eastern Orthodox holiday known as Forgiveness Sunday the last day before Lentthe patriarch did not say a word about fellow Christians under fire in Ukraine outside Eastern Donbas.

No doubt. The real irony, perhaps, is that post-Euromaidan Ukraine was not exactly San Francisco.

What Russia's invasion means for LGBTQI people in Ukraine

The country still bans same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples, and only about one in five people similar to the numbers in Russia believe that homosexuality should be accepted by society. However, for all its problems, Ukraine is sufficiently hospitable to free expression that thousands of people have been able to march under rainbow flags year to year—in contrast to Russia, where attempts to hold such events have ended in violence from both police and anti-gay vigilantes.

One can debate whether the American liberals and progressives who have decisively won the culture war on gay rights are too intolerant toward people who still subscribe to traditional sexual morality, such as Christian bakers and florists who refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings.

Live Now. This article appeared in The Bulwark on March 9, About the Author. Blaming the Ukraine Invasion on … the Gays?