MOSCOW, January 15 (RIA Novosti) – Russia has mounted a diplomatic offensive against “gay propaganda,” accusing the EU in a new report of trying to promote an “alien view of homosexuality and same-sex marriages as a norm of life.”
Criticism of “the aggressive propaganda of homosexual love” is found in the new report on human rights in the EU published Tuesday by the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The report, whose English translation refers to gays as “queers,” slams Europe’s “dissemination of their neo-liberal values as a universal lifestyle for all other members of the international community.”
It also notes “a steady growth of xenophobia, racism, violent nationalism, chauvinism and neo-Nazism” in Europe.
The annual report is the second of its kind by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which has established its own ombudsman’s office.
Russia has floundered in major international rights and freedoms surveys such as the Freedom of the World by the Washington D.C.-based Freedom House, which has ranked it “non-free” in every issue of its annual survey since 2004.
Official Moscow generated extensive backlash in the West when it passed a controversial law in June banning “the promotion of non-traditional sexual relations” among minors.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who signed the law, denied that gay rights are violated in Russia.
