Madonna Learns the Hard Way About Russia Criminalizing Homosexuality
Less than an hour into the proceedings, a reporter tweeted the following, describing Milonov: “He’s breathing really heavily now, which is fair. Our fun-sized courtroom is about to run out of oxygen.” Near the end of the proceedings, he stated: “Just about everyone in our cute little courtroom is soaked with sweat. The judge warns the journalists asking them to stop sniggering.” Climate control being a somewhat foreign concept in Russia, particularly in government buildings.
In short order, with no evidence whatsoever in support, Madonna was accused of threatening Russia’s social order by undermining its childbearing and fueling its divorce rate (i.e., encouraging heterosexual marriages to break up in favor of homosexual experimentation). After that, all of Western civilization was condemned, with the attorney for the plaintiffs stating that the whole notion of gender had been destroyed in the places where Madonna is permitted to express herself freely.
One of the plaintiffs, visibly pregnant, condemned Madonna for advocating tolerance of homosexuality which is an “alien” value in Russia. Another expressed shock and horror because her younger brother had accidentally seen a video clip of the concert on a social network website.
Towards the end, a page from Wikipedia was admitted as evidence defining the nature of the LGBT community. Then evidence of Madonna supporting the gay community in public appearances having nothing whatsoever to do with Russia was admitted. A little later, it was revealed that the plaintiff attorney was a leading figure in a political group advocating that the Russia city of Volgograd be renamed to honor Josef Stalin, whom she greatly admires.
And so it went. Had the defendant been a little less famous and a little more Russian, and had the plaintiffs been a little less psychotic and abrasive, a backbreaking conviction might well have emanated from this “courtroom.” And even if you think like the Russians do and believe homosexuals should be pilloried and subjugated, make no mistake: The law in question is only one example of many similar provisions in Russia designed to crush and liquidate all forms of dissent and dissonance and recreate a homogenous neo-Soviet dictatorship.
Madonna didn’t get convicted, but she did get tried. With no apparent legal basis, a proceeding was convened that could have imposed massive liability upon her and even led to a gruesome criminal investigation. If that can happen to someone like Madonna, just imagine what can happen to an ordinary Russian, and imagine how that Russian will think twice before doing anything that might perturb the Kremlin regime that looms over him like an impenetrably black cloud.
If homosexuality is illegal in Putin’s Russia today, what will be illegal tomorrow?
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Wow. A bunch of Russian “right-wingers” behaving like Western leftists in a courtroom. How amusing.
Except…Russia has never been “right-wing”.
“If homosexuality is illegal in Putin’s Russia today, what will be illegal tomorrow?”
I’m not sure that homosexuality was ever legal in Russia, but then if I were a Russian citizen that would be on the low-end of things to worry about. The fact that Putin arranged to put himself back in power so effortlessly whilst kiling and jailing dissidents would rank much higher.
“I’m not sure that homosexuality was ever legal in Russia…”
It’s not – and they have marriage spelled out int heir Constitution as being between one man and one woman. No confusion there.
“If homosexuality is illegal in Putin’s Russia today, what will be illegal tomorrow?”
I’m not sure I care.
Exactly. It’s like asking, “If Happy Meals are illegal in San Francisco today, what will be illegal there tomorrow?”
No, it’s not at all.
It’s exactly like asking, if homosexuality is legal in San Fransisco today, how long will it be before pedophilia will be legal too?
Oh, wait, they are already arguing that it SHOULD be.
…many of whom sported LGBT paraphernalia like pink wristbands or rainbow insignias…
The plural of insignia is insigne.
Dictionaries do a creditable job of elevating potted plants to sunnier elevations; prior to their modern use, however, writers, editors, and even occasional reporters relied upon them to avoid making public fools of themselves.
As for Russia and its treatment of homosexuals: according to a Moscow-born acquaintance, the less you expect of Russia, the less disappointment you’ll likely encounter.
Hah! I guess I sure showed the old dunce! I intended to write:
The singular of insignia is insigne.
but neglected to switch glasses and proofread my comment.
It is a law of the Internet that all grammar flames will contain grammatical errors.
Just another variant of my law: “What can be got wrong by the expert, will be, and be got right by the amateur.” Some have even called me names: I don’t care! I’m a true pervert, and loving it. Another of my laws!
Allow me to congratulate you on showing the good character to admit a mistake and correct it. What value there is in the Internet relies on honesty like yours.
Russia is facing full societal collapse and needs a scapegoat.
Let’s be honest. That’s hardly a problem confined to Russia.
Don’t Ms Ciccone and her acolytes advocate cultural diversity? Don’t they insist we should respect the right of other cultures to different values? Once upon a time when Russia was still the Soviet Union, they would have objected to any attempt to force Western practice on the Russians.
Russia has been worried about their ongoing demographic crisis for some years now.
Madonna! I have needed a good excuse to like her since the Obama tatoo on her rear end thing. This is that good excuse.
People should read Dostoyevsky get a little understanding of the Russian mind. In his Winter Notes, Dostoyevsky writes a scathing indictment of French bourgoesie culture. Saul Bellow, about 60 years ago, wrote a long essay about this critique. In it he says this about the Russian master:
“Elsewhere, and especially in the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky asks the question that inevitably arises from this attitude:how Christian can a civilization be? And as an artist must, he answers with ever more profound questions. But this severity toward the French never relaxes. In the French bourgeois character he sees a betrayal of the greatest hopes of the modern age.”
Replace bourgeois with Western and you get an idea where Dostoevsky is coming from. But, his perspective or frame of reference (or to use an older term, soul) is so removed from ours it becomes difficult to understand the old slavic mind. Dostoevsky was a nationalist as well as what we would call today, a religious zealot. The Russian Mind or russian culure died in 1917. What stands today is but an ember of the past. Perhaps Madonna woke up this slumbering giant for just a minute. Her commericalized nihilism grates against anyone who remembers past greatness; whether it is Russian or French it doesn’t matter. What would shock Dostoevsky or Goethe, or a Flaubert is our obession with sex and politics (and money). For them this represents a great constriction of the soul and a diminishment of our horizons.
Yes, the ‘ember of the past’ ignited for a minute, though I believe it’s more durable than ‘ember’ would indicate.
Still, it’s interesting to hear some conservatives scream about it.
Martin Luther King’s “content of character” is most reliably measured by behavior. Yet when the subject is Russia, whichever the slice of it, honest measurement flies out the window and stereotype sets in.
The same applies to mere mention of Putin, who is a complex character. I’m not excusing any of his faults. I’m merely saying that, to some, there is nothing whatsoever good about him.
This is Pussy Riot outrage all over again.
(And I will not be surprised if this comment never sees the light of day. Political correctness lives in some surprising places.)
Madonna and Dostoyevsky in the same paragraph. I like that.
She is the fabulous amazing pop icon. The best at what she does. This little thing in a Russian court only plays into the legend.
“The best at what she does”
I agree with that.
She dressed her then-few-years-old daughter in a little sequined outfit with “Boy Toy” across the front and paraded her onto a stage, in front of cameras.
She is a paragon of virtue, an icon of sterling character, just as steadfast as Chuck Berry singing of “My Ding-A-Ling” back during my generation.
Yeah, and looks-wise, she’s holding up pretty well for a woman of age … what? 65 or so? She doesn’t look a day over 59!
“doesn’t look a day over 59″
…
heh
I shall look in the bathroom mirror tomorrow morning and appreciate that wisecrack FAR more. I love it!
For someone in Madonna’s shoes, youth is priceless and she is inexorably screwed.
The only salvation is … well … she and her appearance-obsessed ilk don’t understand it. If M/M Zigfeld selected that photo of her on a stage for the thread, then he/she doesn’t understand it either.
It is hero/heroine worship. Ephemeral is the kindest word one can apply. In the end, it is as thin as a film of Serrano’s dried urine upon the plastic crucifix in his photograph.
Hopefully, M/M Zigfeld will learn.
If you renamed Volgograd after Stalin, it’d be called Stalingrad…which it was during World War II and after. It was (just to be confusing) Tsaritsyn during the Romanov era.
Yeah, the wording of that line jumped out at me – I cannot say whether the author is not aware of the history of Volgograd, or for that matter, of the titanic clash at Stalingrad, arguably the single bloodiest battle (for a single city or field) in human history, but it is certainly worded as if that were so. I would hope he is not oblivious to that.
I haven’t an iota of respect for Stalin, but the fact that one of history’s more significant events took place there when it was previously named for him is worthy of note.
Send Madonna to Siberia forever!
“If that can happen to someone like Madonna, . . .” The thing to remember here is, when you are in another country YOU are subject to their laws AND their application of Their Laws. She was acquitted there because she is Madonna, same thing here! What’s the huff?
Personally I hope the next stop for her Come Out of the Closet Tour is in Iran.
LOL!!! I was headed to the “comment” window when I spotted yours. That’s exactly what I was thinking. I’ll chip in $10 for the plane ticket to send her there.
It should be illegal in this country too. Just like buggerin’ a sheep. At the very least SSAD(Same Sex Attractive Disorder) should be treated as the mental illness it is.
Well, at least she had a kinda sorta trial.
The guy who maybe created the video that didn’t cause Ambasador Stevens death might think Madonna got a pretty good deal. He got thrown in jail for what was it, a parking violation? Of course, our own Vladamir didn’t want him talking about it until after Nov 6, so being thrown in jail was entirely justified by tyrannical edict.
Excellent comparison! Anyone here who is looking down their noses at Russian jurisprudence is naive, at best.
Deliberately, though a bit more subtly, Madonna casts herself in a role as a living version of Serrano’s “Piss Christ”.
It’s therefore not surprising to me that Fundamentalists in the Russian Orthodox Church would be upset with her, like they were upset with Pussy Riot’s behavior in the cathedral. Religious dogma does not a legal argument make, but the emotional origin is understandable.
Understandable, that is, if one doesn’t consider Russian Religionists to be wild-eyed Rasputins with foul-smelling breath and hair shirts. Combine that with a rabid hatred of anything and everything Putin, and one has a column for publication.
And it’s all so politically correct, though with a “conservative” twist.
So you see, it’s possible to despise ordinary, simple people of Faith, even if you’re a Conservative. The second page of this column absolutely reeks with disparagement of Faith, even though you don’t say it.
Perhaps this is why some Conservatives don’t like Social Conservatives. The latter put a crimp in one’s gratuitously hedonistic, elitist style.
And I thought my mother was nuts …. Madonna could be my little sister …. I can only think of her children …. At least they will have trust funds ….
I thought the left was disgusted at the idea of America going around the globe and shoving “American values” in the faces of other cultures.
I guess it’s OK when the left controls what those “American values” are, huh?
America has become enslaved to pleasure-seeking. It was subtle in the Fifties. I’ve read that the war-scared Silent Generation and its parents became compulsive addicts. Two “Great Wars” in as many generations? It’s very possible. Peyton Place a rebellion against the imperative of “have to.” There was a Fifties book on the Comfortable Pew — capital-F Faith become capital-R Religion, because Faith was entirely too personal, too demanding, too restrictive.
Be that as it may, elements of the Silent Generation consciously led the Boomer Generation down the garden path of gratification — Bill Haley, rock rock rock, just change a consonant — Bob Dylan, Greenwich Village, enough said — “The Wild Bunch”, Hollywood pushing the limits for no other reason than to push them.
And now we have Madonna. Hedonism writ large. Portrayed as virtue incarnate by allegedly “conservative” … i.e., traditionalist … whatevers.
Spare me.
You are a pusher, a pusher of the limits.
You implicitly respect and love Madonna? Then you equally implicitly reject everything my parents and I ever stood for. You have made your bed — more than metaphorically — so lie in it.
I’m in your corner there.
All I see in America is immaturity.
On the left it’s exemplified in the Occupier idiots. They cry for “the important people” to fix everything… they just can’t tell you how. It’s above them. They just cry “Take care of me like I’m the state’s pet!”
On the right it’s the creeping narcissism of the the libertarians. “Nobody can tell me what to do at any time about anything EVER!” They are incapable of seeing that ALL human beings have to behave themselves – not just police and politicians. Everybody.
Madonna is the worst of it all wrapped up in one Babylonian Whore.
Indeed regarding your comments on libertarianism. I always like to tell libertarians that they are not arguing for libertarianism but libertinism. There’s nothing libertarian about wanton sex and drug use.
Could have used you over at Simon’s recent blog. It got messy between the conservatives and the libertarians. I’m still in a funk about it.
Madonna is a obnoxious hag, not worth thinking about. It would be fun to see her end up in a foreign prison.
Bluntly (and while staring into the mirror) Zigfeld’s arrogance has ch*pped my ***.
Does M/M/whatever Zigfeld care what we write? I doubt it.
Don Marquis’ Mehitabel dismissed emotional turmoil with ‘whothehell, whothehell’. That eloquence isn’t for anyone who thinks ‘like a virgin’ is artistic. To them, it’s Scripture.
M/M Zigfeld appears to be a Pop Culture hero-worshipper, uncaring about whatever mere mortals think. Two millennia of the history, thinking and sheer survival of whatever Church, Russian or otherwise, doesn’t mean cr*p to Zigfeld, who doesn’t give an **** about the nature of Faith, inside the individual. A capital-R Religion, a capital-C Church is all which Zigfeld needs to know about. Categorical. Easy and simple.
From the unwashed, bitter-clinging (but American) hinterlands, same to you, Zigfeld.
Do not get too harsh – it is just Zigfeld Follies.
*grin*
Not all is well in Russia, as demonstrated by the judge: He disappointed. If nothing else, he should have sent the organic-peroxide wretch in the slammer for not being able to sing, That is a global offence, I believe.
Madonna is a bilious skank.
It was so risible, the story about Madonna keeping $400 concert ticket holders waiting 2 hours while she watched the Presidential debates. What kind of idiots pay $400 dollars to see her perform in concert?
Madonna needs to go back to Russia and demand her rights to be and promote homosexuals.
I mean just who in the Hell does Putin think he is?
Madonna needs to go and speak out against the man like she did promoting Obama and denouncing the republicans.
What does she have to fear?
After all she is a liberal, socialists and a Communist she should get along well with Vlad.
We have a similar system at Baxter. I’ve found it to become somewhat slacking over time though. Flickr and all pictures at all used to be blocked under the category: network storage. Now I can view to my hearts content.
Putin’s Russia may be a bit on a the “unhinged” side, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
According to KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, he was taught to encourage feminism, homosexual rights, and racial justice as a way of dividing and conquering non-communist countries. As soon as the communists took over a country, they’d put a stop to gay lib, woman’s lib, and “any other kind of lib”.
Having never watched the Bezmenov lectures, leftists around the world were shocked in 2007 when Maoist rebels controlling 80% of Nepal launched a campaign against “moral pollution”. Gay Nepalis, most of whom supported the Maoists, had suddenly outlived their usefulness.