Miranda Blue has now published the final two installments in her Right Wing Watch series about the role of the religious right in globalizing homophobia (especially in Russia). I blogged about the first two essays in the series several days ago. I'm grateful to reader Chris Morley for pointing out in a comment responding to that posting that the other essays in the series have now been published.
The third part of the series documents the wide-ranging influence that Mark Regnerus's discredited study of "gay" parents is now enjoying in Russia: it documents the direct influence of Regnerus's bought-and-paid for "research" about "gay" parenting on the anti-gay legislation now in place in Russia. As Blue notes, the Duma member who introduced the bill banning gay "propaganda" in Russia, Yelena Mizulina, cited Regnerus's research in a June meeting of the Duma committee that then proposed banning adoption by same-sex couples. That meeting was attended by Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage and a contingent of far-right anti-gay French political activists with whom Brown had been working to organize demonstrations against marriage equality in France.
Blue notes that Regnerus's study was funded by the Witherspoon Institute and the Bradley Foundation, and that Robert P. George, one of the founders of NOM, also cofounded the Witherspoon Institute and sits on the board of the Bradley Foundation. George was a drafter of the infamous Manhattan Declaration, which called for a continuation of the culture war on LGBT Americans several years ago.
As Blue also notes, though Regnerus has claimed he's unhappy to see his bogus study of "gay" parents cited by Russian political leaders as they craft their anti-gay legislation, Regnerus recently appeared at an event organized by the anti-gay Alliance Defending Freedom to discuss ways in which to inject anti-gay politics into discussions of the UN's Millennium Development Goals.
Finally, in the last piece in her four-part series, Blue shows how thickly interwoven several leading anti-gay organizations in the U.S., including the World Conference of Families and NOM, have now become with leaders of the anti-gay political movement in Russia. As she concludes, American right-wing anti-gay activists are doing everything in their power to export American-style homophobia to other parts of the globe--now notably Eastern Europe--for the following reason:
Anti-gay activists in the United States, finding it increasingly difficult to push their agenda at home, have turned to Russia both as a place receptive to their politics and as a "savior" of the world against increasing social liberalism. In doing so, they have provided international backing for an oppressive, anti-democratic regime that is increasingly using LGBT people as scapegoats for broader political dissatisfaction.
In my view, we can look for more of this exporting of anti-gay hatred by right-wing groups in the U.S., with financial backing from the wealthy elites who channel money into groups like the Witherspoon Institute, the Bradley Foundation, and NOM. It's all they have left, after all, as they argue that bias against gay and lesbian human beings is "natural" and that, in urging such bias, they're merely adhering to the dictates of nature. It's all they have left, that is to say, as such bias is increasingly rejected by most citizens of the developed sector of the globe.
The goal of those exporting homophobia from the parts of the world in which homophobic hatred is no longer a viable commodity is to light fires of anti-gay prejudice anywhere in the world that conditions appear right for such fires to burn bright, so that they can then turn around and inform people in the developed sectors of the world that homophobia is natural, and that cultures who dispense with homophobic bias are rebelling against nature and the God who crafted nature in this way.
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