Moscow Mayor Speaks Against Homosexuality at London
Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov publicly spoke against homosexuality calling it “wrong and unusual” in a London news conference attended by his Paris and Berlin counterparts, both of them gay, the Bloomberg.com web-site reported March 1.
Luzhkov, in the U.K. capital for a meeting of the leaders of Europe’s four largest cities, also repeated his opposition to a Gay Pride parade planned for May 27 in Moscow. He has called such a march “satanic.” Last year’s Moscow Gay Pride parade, held in defiance of a ban, was broken up by police.
“Through the gay parade you promote some uncertain people and it becomes an invitation to acquire this quality of the sexual minorities,” Luzhkov said at the briefing with the mayors of London, Paris and Berlin.
The Moscow mayor, in office since 1992, conceded that Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe and Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit disagreed with his views when they met with London Mayor Ken Livingstone, a longtime supporter of gays and lesbians.
The mayors discussed the issue “in a peaceful and calm way,” Delanoe said. “We have to look at equality of rights, and that leads us to combat every form of discrimination or stigmatizing of individuals because of their sex, their religion, color of their skin or their personal identity,” he said.
Livingstone and Wowereit didn’t comment publicly on Luzhkov’s views.
The mayors also agreed to cooperate in areas such as transportation, climate change, terrorism and planning. They will meet next year in Paris.
A dozen gay-rights advocates picketed outside London City Hall during the meeting. Organizers are planning to go ahead with the Moscow parade, the London-based gay-rights group OutRage! said in an e-mailed statement.
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“If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”
[…] As I skimmed through the day’s articles in Central Asia and Russia, I found two that talked about homosexuality. One was at Russian Spy. This is pretty funny. The mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, was speaking at a press conference in London. At the press conference, he said that homosexuality was “wrong and unusual” and spoke openly about his opposition to a gay parade in Moscow. This in front of the mayors of Paris and Berlin who happened to be openly gay. Luzhkov called the gay parade “satanic”. Gay parade organizers are still fighting to be able to have the Gay Parade scheduled for May 27. […]
[…] The Metropolitan Police are investigating a complaint of an alleged assault on Russian gay activist and journalist Nikolai Alekseev in London last week following the press conference given by the mayors of London, Berlin, Paris, Moscow and Beijing at City Hall, 247gay.com Web site reports. […]