Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbySeptember 5th, 2013
Russian State Duma Deputy Akexey Zhuravlev has published a draft bill on Parliament’s web site which would make the “fact of nontraditional sexual orientation” a cause for denying custody for gay parents over their children. According to the Kremlin-backed Russia Today:
State Duma deputy from United Russia parliamentary caucus claims that the recently introduced ban on promotion of non-traditional sex relations to minors should be extended to families. Therefore, homosexual parents have no right to raise their children.
MP Aleksey Zhuravlev submitted the suggested amendments to the Family Code to the State Duma on Thursday. The explanatory note to the bill reads that non-traditional sexual orientation of one or both parents would become sufficient reason to deprive both of them of their parental rights.
“Following the letter of the law that forbids propaganda of non-traditional sex to minors we must restrict such propaganda not only in mass media but also the family,” Zhuravlev wrote. His reasoning is that “if one of the child’s parents indulges in sexual contact with persons of the same sex, the damage to the child’s psyche is immense as a mother or father serves as an example for their offspring.”
The amendments should apply to those whose families have already collapsed because of the non-traditional contacts of one of the spouses and also to the families where non-traditional sex is openly practiced by one of the parents, the note reads. It adds that for cases when a wife simply suspects her husband of non-traditional sex, the court and the Investigative Committee (Russia’s top law enforcement agency created for dealing with especially important and resonant cases), “have specialists trained in everything.” [Emphasis in the original.]
Russia Today also notes that in accompanying supporting documents, Zhuravlev refers the the fraudulent and debunked paper published in 2012 by University of Austin professor Mark Regnerus, whose paper was paid for with a $700,000 from the Witherspoon Institute.
Russia Today reports that several top Deputies are “very skeptical about the initiative.” RIA Novosti adds:
The idea of stripping LGBT parents of their rights was first aired in June by ultraconservative Duma lawmaker Yelena Mizulina, an ardent backer of the ban on “gay propaganda.”
Mizulina’s proposal prompted one of Russia’s most prominent gay rights champions, liberal journalist Masha Gessen, to leave Russia for the United States. Gessen said she feared the two children she was raising with her girlfriend could be taken away from her.
“As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children,” Gessen, who holds dual Russian-American citizenship, said in an op-ed in The Guardian newspaper last month.
Zhuravlev, a member of Putin’s United Russia party as well as the All-Russia People’s Front, was selected to lead Russia’s newly-reconstituted nationalist Rodina (short for Motherland-National Patriotic Union) party last year.
Latest Posts
Featured Reports
In this original BTB Investigation, we unveil the tragic story of Kirk Murphy, a four-year-old boy who was treated for “cross-gender disturbance” in 1970 by a young grad student by the name of George Rekers. This story is a stark reminder that there are severe and damaging consequences when therapists try to ensure that boys will be boys.
When we first reported on three American anti-gay activists traveling to Kampala for a three-day conference, we had no idea that it would be the first report of a long string of events leading to a proposal to institute the death penalty for LGBT people. But that is exactly what happened. In this report, we review our collection of more than 500 posts to tell the story of one nation’s embrace of hatred toward gay people. This report will be updated continuously as events continue to unfold. Check here for the latest updates.
In 2005, the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote that “[Paul] Cameron’s ‘science’ echoes Nazi Germany.” What the SPLC didn”t know was Cameron doesn’t just “echo” Nazi Germany. He quoted extensively from one of the Final Solution’s architects. This puts his fascination with quarantines, mandatory tattoos, and extermination being a “plausible idea” in a whole new and deeply disturbing light.
On February 10, I attended an all-day “Love Won Out” ex-gay conference in Phoenix, put on by Focus on the Family and Exodus International. In this series of reports, I talk about what I learned there: the people who go to these conferences, the things that they hear, and what this all means for them, their families and for the rest of us.
Prologue: Why I Went To “Love Won Out”
Part 1: What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Part 2: Parents Struggle With “No Exceptions”
Part 3: A Whole New Dialect
Part 4: It Depends On How The Meaning of the Word "Change" Changes
Part 5: A Candid Explanation For "Change"
At last, the truth can now be told.
Using the same research methods employed by most anti-gay political pressure groups, we examine the statistics and the case studies that dispel many of the myths about heterosexuality. Download your copy today!
And don‘t miss our companion report, How To Write An Anti-Gay Tract In Fifteen Easy Steps.
Anti-gay activists often charge that gay men and women pose a threat to children. In this report, we explore the supposed connection between homosexuality and child sexual abuse, the conclusions reached by the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, and how anti-gay activists continue to ignore their findings. This has tremendous consequences, not just for gay men and women, but more importantly for the safety of all our children.
Anti-gay activists often cite the “Dutch Study” to claim that gay unions last only about 1½ years and that the these men have an average of eight additional partners per year outside of their steady relationship. In this report, we will take you step by step into the study to see whether the claims are true.
Tony Perkins’ Family Research Council submitted an Amicus Brief to the Maryland Court of Appeals as that court prepared to consider the issue of gay marriage. We examine just one small section of that brief to reveal the junk science and fraudulent claims of the Family “Research” Council.
The FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics aren’t as complete as they ought to be, and their report for 2004 was no exception. In fact, their most recent report has quite a few glaring holes. Holes big enough for Daniel Fetty to fall through.
“Google” is a trademark of Google Inc.
© Box Turtle Bulletin. All Rights Reserved.
Posts 
Posts via daily email:
etseq
September 5th, 2013
In the original RT story, there was the following statement:
“Regnerus claims that the children of people who have homosexual relations are less likely to call themselves ‘fully straight’ than the children of heterosexual parents (60-70 percent against 90 percent).”
I don’t think he made that claim in his paper but obviously someone has used the dataset he released (I remember there being a sexual orientation question in the survey instrument). I just assumed it wasn’t significant otherwise the usual right wing suspects would have been touting it as proof gayness is infectious. This is the first time I’ve seem the Regnerus study cited for this claim and I’m curious if they used the larger group (like 260 or so I cant remember exactly that said one parent had same sex affair) or the smaller (like 50 or so – that lived with both same sex partners) for the sample size.
In any event, the data set has too much noise in it to even attempt such a claim and I’m pretty sure Regnerus didn’t want to open that can of worms. But I doubt that a Rusiian lawmaker is the first one to notice this so I’d be curious to know which right wing american group is behind this particular claim. My guess would be Scott Lively???
—jwg
Darina
September 13th, 2013
And now a Russian site called Politblog (I’d never heard of it before) claims that Regnerus himself agreed to talk to them, and said that his study was misinterpreted and shouldn’t be used to justify taking people’s children away from them. The Google translation isn’t too terrible.
http://www.gq.ru/blogs/politblog/50522_sut_moego_issledovaniya_izvrashchena.php
Leave A Comment