Skip to main content

Protest the Banning of Moscow Pride

In the past few weeks, we learned that Moscow was following in Warsaw's footsteps with plans to ban the organisation of gay pride there. Local religious leaders joined their voices and actually physically threatened potential participants. Last week, Ken Livingston, mayor of london, joined the mayors of Paris and Berlin, as well as Merlin Holland, grandson of Oscar Wilde, in a call for Moscow Pride to take place.

Now it is time for "the man (and woman) in the street" to show their support for this event...


Russian Embassy picket

Thursday 2 March 2006
12:00 Noon – 2:00 PM
Russian Embassy
13 Kensington Palace Gardens
London W8 4QX

A demonstration in solidarity with Russian LGBT groups will be held outside the Russian Embassy on Thursday 2 March 2006, from 12 noon, to protest the banning of Moscow Pride by the Mayor of Moscow and threats of violence by Russian religious leaders.

The protest is being called by the organisers of the International Day Against Homophobia and will coincide with parallel protests in other European cities.

Click here for a map

Nearest Tube: Notting Hill Gate (0.3 miles)
Nearest Train: Paddington (0.8 miles)

Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov has announced that the city government will not allow a gay parade "in any form" and any attempt to hold a gay event will be "resolutely quashed"

Chief Mufti of Russia's Central Spiritual Governance for Muslims, Talgat Tajuddin said: "Muslims' protests can be even worse than these notorious rallies abroad over the scandalous cartoons… The parade should not be allowed, and if they still come out into the streets, then they should be bashed," he added.

Russian Chief Rabbi Berl Lazar said that if a gay pride was allowed to go ahead it "would be a blow for morality". He said the the Jewish community would not stand by silently. "Sexual perversions", he said, did not have a right to exist.

A spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church (who have lobbied the mayor to ban the parade) spoke out against Moscow Pride, telling various media outlets that homosexuality is a "sin which destroys human beings and condemns them to a spiritual death."

Russian LGBT groups have called on their counterparts in other capital cities to demonstrate outside Russian embassies to make sure the issue gets the attention of the Russian media and to show their support for Russia’s struggling gay community.

The UK coordinator of the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO), Derek Lennard – who is helping to organise the protest in London – said:

"The first Pride in Moscow is of enormous and enormous importance particularly to the LGBT communities in the Baltic and Eastern European Countries. All those who are able to take the freedom to organise Pride for granted will surely want show their support for the LGBT community in Moscow."

Simultaneous demonstrations are planned in Paris and Warsaw.

Moscow Pride is part of an International Gay Festival in May which will be attended by 250 people including politicians and campaigners from all over the world.



Pass this on...

The international IDAHO website is www.idahomophobia.org
For more information, email info@idaho-uk.org

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave your comment here. Note that comments are moderated and only those in French or in English will be published. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog and to leave a thought.

Popular posts from this blog

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...
19 comments
Read more

Rev. Peter Mullen's Blog

Rev. Peter Mullen is the chaplain to the London Stock Exchange and the rector of St Michael's Cornhill and St Sepulchre without Newgate in the City. Rev. Peter Mullen was also until recently a blogger. Sadly the result of his cyber labour seem to have been deleted but Google has thankfully cached some of it and I have saved a copy for posterity, just in case. The deletion of Rev. Mullen's writings might just have something to do with the fact that last week, the Evening Standard and then the Daily Mail published an article (the same article actually) about some of those very writings (even though the elements of said writings being quoted had been published in June this year, at the time of the blessing ceremony which took place between two members of the Church of England in St Bartholomew the Great - picture ). In the article, we learned what the Rev. thinks about gay people and what should be done to them: We ["Religious believers"] disapprove of homosexuality ...
8 comments
Read more

pink sauce | life, with a pink seasoning

As of tonight, my blog Aimless Ramblings of Zefrog , that "place where I can vent my frustration, express ideas and generally open my big gob without bothering too many people" which will be 6 in a couple of months, becomes Pink Sauce . While the URLs zefrog.blogspot.com and www.zefrog.eu are still valid to access this page, the main URL now becomes www.pinksauce.co.uk. There is a vague plan to create a proper website for www.zefrog.eu to which the blog would be linked. Why Pink Sauce , you may ask. It is both simple and complicated. For several years, I have grown out of love for the name of the blog. It felt a bit cumbersome and clumsy. That said, I never really looked into changing it, seriously. Tonight, for dinner, I had pasta with a special pink sauce of my concoction ; single cream and ketchup. I know most people while feel nauseous at the very though of the mixture but trust me, it's gorgeous. Don't knock it till you've tried it. After having had my platte...
4 comments
Read more