NOBODY on DU is pro-Putin...nobody here ever has been.

[Ken Burch]

50. That isn't what is happening here.

Nobody's using the rights of Russian LGBTQ people as a chess piece...in fact, what some of us are actually questioning is the use of a supposed concern for Russian LGBTQ rights as a pretext by U.S. right-wingers in order to drag us all back into the Cold War...an era when LGBTQ people made almost no meaningful gains in their rights anywhere, btw.

btw...the Jackson/Vanik Amendment was an example of using a people's rights as a chess piece. Nobody in the Ford Administration or and hardly any of those who backed Jackson/Vanik actually cared about Soviet Jews at all...they were simply using supposed concern for their rights(rights the U.S. right wing hadn't given a damn about when it passed the "Jewish Exclusion" immigration quotas of 1923 that barred almost all further Jewish immigration to the U.S. and, thus, guaranteed the near-success of Hitler's project of genocide), they just wanted to keep us in a confrontation with "those Commie bastards" at a time when the USSR was already in long-term decline and when there was no real reason anymore for continued massive U.S. nuclear stockpiles or interventionist policies in African and Latin American countries. Yes, it ended up, by chance, getting some Soviet Jews out of the USSR...but that was never out of actual concern about them on the part of any right-wing "Christian" U.S. politicians.