A newly-discovered anti-gay video making the rounds in Russia (see the video below with subtitles) claims that gays adopt children so that they’ll have a readily available source of kids to rape.
Even more troubling, the video bases its adoption-child-rape assertion on a debunked faux-scientific “study” from Mark Regnerus, a religious right researcher whose “gay parenting” study was roundly rebuked for only including two kids who actually grew up with gay parents. Yes, a whopping review of 2 children makes a scientific “study” of gay parenting. The “study” was also called “bullsh*t” by an auditor after it was published.
First: I don't know how Mark Regnerus sleeps at night.
Second: My heart breaks for the gay parents and their children—many of them Americans (and some of whom I recognize)—who are shown in this vile and offensive propaganda video.
And third: anti-gay propaganda attacking gay parents lays the groundwork for passage a yet another anti-gay law in Russia, one that would rip children from the homes of their gay or lesbian parents and place them in notoriously awful Russian orphanages. ("Of course [a lesbian parent] should definitely be deprived of her rights to the child," Alexei Zhuravlev, deputy of the Russian Duma, said in an interview. "Homosexuals must not raise children. They corrupt them. They do them much more harm than if the child were in an orphanage. I am deeply convinced of this.")
After months of rumors, a bill was introduced in the Russian Duma that compares LGBT people to alcoholics and drug abusers and would deny LGBT Russians custody of their own biological or adopted children.
[Russian journalist Masha] Gessen had already sent her oldest son overseas, fearful that he'd be snatched by the government.
"My situation is that my partner and I are raising three kids, one of whom is adopted and two of whom are biological," Gessen explained to me yesterday on my radio program in an interview from Moscow. "In June the Russian parliament banned adoption by same-sex couples. It was a fair assumption that the law could be used to annul the adoption of our oldest son, so we made the decision to send our oldest son out of the country immediately."
But now, if the new law passes—the adoption law passed in four days—Gessen's biological children could be taken too.
