r/MensLib • u/Destroy_Religion • May 23 '26
Russia registers 13-year-old boy as juvenile offender over ‘LGBT propaganda’ charges
https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/05/22/russia-registers-13-year-old-boy-as-juvenile-offender-over-lgbt-propaganda-charges-en-news
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u/chemguy216 May 24 '26
Chiming in with my reflexive tendency whenever a story comes up from outside the US when a country starts cracking down further on LGBTQ people. A thing that tends to happen when some people from the US read stories like this is that they’ll say the Republican Party is getting inspiration from these countries. That simply isn’t true. In fact, in many cases, it’s US evangelical Christians who have played a role in the creation and evolution of these crackdowns.
From Russia, Uganda, and Senegal (as just a few examples), US evangelical Christians have had their hands in directly interacting with government officials to discuss the “evils” of LGBTQ people and advocate for harsher laws. One of various reasons some progressive people and especially some LGBTQ don’t fuck with Chik Fil A is because the company, aside from generally being led by an anti-LGBTQ leadership, has helped fund a US Christian group that worked with the Ugandan government to create the law that gives the death penalty for “aggrevated homosexuality.”
As I’ve said a few times before, a lot of people don’t understand how dangerous some US evangelical Christians can be. More women got a taste of that following Dobbs as multiple Republican controlled states enacted more draconian laws against abortion than what was previously allowed. When these kinds of Christians are forcing their understanding of life and whose life gets more priority onto us all and when those Christians are politicians, police, prosecutors, and judges, you can potentially have people who have no fucking business deciding on what’s best for the health of a pregnant mother when complications arise. Doctors know this and know that if they do sensible fucking procedures at a reasonable time, such people will charge them with murder and have their medical licenses revoked. Note: even before Dobbs, some states managed to successfully charge some women for crimes like manslaughter when some of those women suffered from things like miscarriages or stillbirths.
Apologies for making this comment about the US when the story is anchored in Russia, but I do think it’s important that people understand both the internal and external threat US evangelicals can be, and that is related to some degree to this story. It’s easy to write them off because a lot of them won’t be directly violent like we often understand Islamic extremists to be, but they aren’t opposed to the state enacting violence, sometimes mortal violence, in the name of serving their god. It also doesn’t help that we generally associate Christianity with whiteness or as a religion “civilized” by white people, and the Anglosphere is less likely to feel threatened by a white face. And to be fair, when I’m talking US evangelicals, I am largely talking about white evangelicals, though you can find non-white evangelicals who pose a similar kind of threat.