Who's Sergei?
What I don't get about
Pravda articles on American culture is the idea that they have any relevance to reality. I mean, if
Sergei Vasilenko actually had any idea what he was going on about, the article might be a useful glimpse inside a Russian mind. We should not take that glimpse as anything representative of Russian society in whole, largely because Vasilenko's ignorance and dishonesty.
In late December 2010, Barack Obama signed a controversial document, that abolished the previous law signed by Bill Clinton. The essence of the document is as follows. A serviceman, being a representative of sexual minorities, has an unconditional right to serve in the U.S. Army, but he should not disclose his orientation to other servicemen. In turn, officers have no right to take an interest in this issue among their subordinates.
To wit, I would challenge Vasilenko to find any one person who was discharged from, or merely investigated by, the U.S. armed forces for disclosing his heterosexuality. That was the underlying problem of DADT, as it maintained a supremacist ideology.
But something also might be getting lost in translation. To wit, the next paragraph in the article makes no sense syntactically, unless it's describing some hypothetical fantasy:
In this case, Obama was, as they say, in the wake of sexual minorities that considered the laws hypocritical as it obliged them to conceal the true nature of their feelings. This time, the U.S. president goes even further to equalize the rights of the supporters of both conventional and gay marriage. As soon as the new law is enacted, gay people in all American states, not just nine of them (New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Maine, Hampshire, Connecticut, Maryland, Iowa, Vermont that legalized gay marriage a while back) will have the right to conclude marriage.
But it seems clear that Vasilenko is more comfortable in centuries past—
It can also be directly connected to new influences that decay the morals of modern society. Trendy views, freedom of expression, have been replacing human values lately. All this and many other things show a devastating impact on traditional human, family and personal values of the modern civilization. The U.S. is no exception.
—which would explain why he is so disconnected from the realities of the twenty-first century:
The adoption of such a revolutionary law in one of the world's leading powers may trigger similar processes in many other countries of the world that look up to the United States. Swinging the pendulum of moral decay, American policy-makers will not be able to control it afterwards. Such an embarrassment has already occurred to America before and continues to haunt the world. It goes about the chain of democratic revolutions in the East, which the U.S. State Department initiated. The process went out of control and embraced even the states loyal to the U.S. regime.
I mean, perhaps Vasilenko missed it, but the U.S. is trailing its neighbors in the gay marriage discussion.
But what it really comes down to is that Vasilenko is just another hatemonger:
Giving a "green corridor" to gay marriage once, the world may have serious and perhaps insurmountable, problems in the future. The legalization, and thus recognition of such families on the state level will expose many people, who have been hiding their orientation from others. This will make the homosexual society grow. Some activists may then wish to legalize more serious crimes against public morality.
Frankly, I would point out that we already legalize serious crimes against public morality, else Vasilenko would not be accessible in the U.S.:
Family, in the common sense of the word, is a cell of a healthy society that leads to the appearance of new generations, thus providing the domination of births over deaths. What can same-sex marriage offer? Extinction and degradation?
I don't know, Sergei, maybe among all that extinction and degradation, some gay couples might adopt the children whose heterosexual parents don't want them. You know, the over one hundred thousand American children known to need permanent homes and family structures? So, you know, why don't the heterosexual traditionalists
stop having so many damn babies?
The behavioural example that parents show to their children is an important factor in the educational process of personality. Mankind may face the problem of cultivating homosexuality among the children, whose parents share a "non-traditional" orientation. Every fifth gay couple or family in the U.S. has either children born from previous heterosexual marriage, or adopted children. In total, we are talking about more than two million human lives. What kind of people will they be? Today, the United States of America is a state of democratic freedom and economic stability, where dreams come true. The American way of life excites modern world consciousness, causing cultural revolutions, regime changes and social upheavals. The U.S. largely serves as an example for other countries and their citizens. It is highly important that this example should be positive ...
One wonders at the sort of depraved mind that looks to morons like Mr. Vasilenko for sympathetic expression. To the other, though, Vasilenko does, in fact, successfully demonstrate a problem with American values: Freedom of speech is not weighed down by any obligation to actually have a clue what one is talking about, a point very neatly exploited by the Russian author.
It's bad enough that Americans taking part in the public discussion of gay rights actually need to be reminded of the historical record. It's even worse when some foreign author looking to pick a bone with Americans tries to capitalize on that ignorance in order to float useless biscuits like that.
And the sad sort of bigot who seconds such excrement? Well, birds of a feather soil the park together, I guess.
____________________
Notes:
Vasilenko, Sergei. "How will gay marriage change the world?" Pravda. February 27, 2013. English.Pravda.ru. February 28, 2013. http://english.pravda.ru/society/family/27-02-2013/123915-gay_marriage-0/