Russian security forces raided gay clubs and bars across Moscow Friday night, less than 48 hours after the country’s top court banned what it called the “global LGBTQ+ movement” as an extremist organization.
Police searched venues across the Russian capital, including a nightclub, a male sauna, and a bar that hosted LGBTQ+ parties, under the pretext of a drug raid, local media reported.
Eyewitnesses told journalists that clubgoers’ documents were checked and photographed by the security services. They also said that managers had been able to warn patrons before police arrived.
The Russian conservatives include plenty of gay people. Obviously hypocritical, but I wouldn’t expect them to support actual extermination.
The reason such actions happen is to show the average ignorant citizen (as Putin & co imagine that) that what said person wants is being delivered. Of course the average ignorant citizen doesn’t care about hurting LGBTQ people (at worst cares about hurting anyone happier than him, but still with no specifics). They just have a skewed picture of what that average citizen is, some drunk guided (in their imagination) by Russian prison culture only interested in having a better car.
Ah, also Putin & co are not conservatives. They in general have no consistent ideology to speak of. Take anyone important - they’ve been with “democrats pushing for reform” in the last years of the USSR, then “democrats fighting the Communist beast” in Yeltsin’s early years, then “centrists trying to prevent the integrity of the federation” in his late years, then with Putin “law against terrorism”, then “law against neo-Nazis”, then “economic stability unlike the bad-bad 90s”, and so on. At some point they got lazy and the facades became less consistent and memorable.