The Russian Orthodox Church is ready to ask the government to block Facebook throughout the entire country. The reason? Facebook has added two icons to its marriage set, which users can post on their page to identify their relationship status – a gay couple and a lesbian couple.
Demonstrating that reactionary churches worldwide share a similar uncontrolled overreaction when it comes to same-sex couples, church leaders want Facebook to “stop flirting with sodomites.” They are clear about what they want:
“We demand only one thing: Facebook should be blocked in the entire country because it openly popularizes homosexuality among minors…”
It’s unlikely many Russian minors will be getting married, much less gay-married, but you can see where these folks are coming from. Facebook is a private company, and it has a lot of appeal, both to young people and those of us who are young at heart.
I don’t know much about the demographics of the Russian Orthodox Church, so I can’t tell whether this is another religion engaging in culture envy. But as with their American evangelical and middle eastern Muslim counterparts, the hysterical rhetoric of the church leaders is revealing. The vast, vast number of Facebook users are not homosexual, and will not be using the gay marriage icon. But the simple fact that it is available to the small minority that is homosexual is enough to taint the entire company, so much that it should be banned by the government.
This disproportion has characterized prejudice for a very long time. It is the One Drop Rule for gay tolerance: Any group anywhere that even acknowledges the existence of gay couples (or even gay singles, I’d imagine) is completely tainted by the stigma of that acceptance. No tolerance can be tolerated.
I’m fairly confident ordinary Russians will have the same response to these Church Ladies that Americans tend to have.
And it’s nice to know that it’s not just American religious extremists who hate the private sector.
8 Comments for “One Drop”
posted by Jim on
“I don’t know much about the demographics of the Russian Orthodox Church, so I can’t tell whether this is another religion engaging in culture envy.”
It has nothing to do with envy of anyone else’s culture. It is all just simple peasant ignorance. Orthodoxy and peasant Russia were the darlings of Tolstoy and like-minded romantics.
The whole history of modernization in Russia has been a struggle against the obscurantist, xenophobic and militantly primitivist impulses in Russian culture that the Orthodox Church was seen to be the champion of. This struggle shows up all the time in Russian literature in the period leading up to the revolution. For all its other faults and crimes, Communism in Russia made some progress in breaking up that culural phlegm.
That’s where this comes from.
posted by AG on
It helps not to display your own ignorance while denouncing the ignorance of others. In the last several decades of his life Tolstoy rejected the official religion, which led the Russian Orthodox Church to excommunicate him in 1901.
posted by Jim on
And that somehow erases his earlier embrace? You’re not really at home with this thinking stuff, are you?
posted by KipEsquire on
It would be nice if someone in the blogospheric chain of custody would actually RTFA. This is a gaggle of yokels in some backwater village and is not associated with the ROC bureaucracy. Basically a Westboro Russkie Church. BFD.
posted by Throbert McGee on
Saratov is a reasonably large city (not a “backwater village”), but, yeah, I think most Russians would regard it as “flyover country,” so KipEsquire is basically right about that part.
And the phrase “the Russian Orthodox Church” in the opening sentence is highly misleading; it’s like confusing Bill Donahue’s “Catholic League” with “the Roman Catholic Church.” It should say “a group of Russian Orthodox Christians has demanded…”, or something like that.
P.S. The Orthodox blowhard calling for this ban of Facebook claims, among other things, that “homosexuality and lesbianism” are some kind of American plot to bring down the Russian birth rate. Someone needs to inform him that homosexuality was actually invented by the Soviets (along with rock music) to corrupt American youth…
posted by Houndentenor on
Russia: new economic policy, same despotic assholes still in charge.
posted by Jorge on
I don’t know much about the demographics of the Russian Orthodox Church
What? Restraint on a David Link post on Catholics? Am I hallucinating?
And the phrase “the Russian Orthodox Church” in the opening sentence is highly misleading; it’s like confusing Bill Donahue’s “Catholic League” with “the Roman Catholic Church.” It should say “a group of Russian Orthodox Christians has demanded…”, or something like that.
Oh, LOL! Never mind! We’re hitting par for the course here.
The only thing I know about the Russian Orthodox is some story I read about immigrant babushkas counter-protesting gay rights marches and laying hands on gay people. If only it were that easy!
Hmm… nope! Still gay.
posted by This week in queer web content // July 23, 2012 « Queerism on
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