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New protests are providing the fuel for progressive and legal change for gays in Russia. MOSCOW, Russia, early morning, 5/27/10 — While the bigoted mayor of this city has once again banned gay pride this […]
Co-founder of the Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism and the Gay Liberation Network (www.GayLiberation.net), a Chicago-based LGBT direct action group which has been at the forefront of gay rights, anti-police brutality and anti-war organizing. He’s been one of the lead organizers of most of the city’s large anti-war protests for the last several years, including a march of 15,000 on Lake Shore Drive at the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He’s been arrested numerous times in various protests and was recently found not guilty of two felony counts from a January 2008 protest against a Chicago visit by then-President George W. Bush. In May he was among a handful of Western LGBT activists arrested along with dozens of Russians activists at a government-banned gay pride demonstration in Moscow, Russia. He currently is among the activists organizing a march on the Obama 2012 National Campaign Headquarters in Chicago on the 10th anniversary of America’s longest-ever war, the Afghanistan War. He and other activists are also helping organize the huge protests that will confront the May 2012 NATO/G8 meetings in Chicago.
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Comments
Coming from a country which illegally imprisons people without trial, tortures them, and has troops occupying over 130 countries around the world, I will not presume to speak about human rights on behalf of my government.
Rather, I would like to speak in the tradition of those who organized against that government in order to win greater rights. And there is no better example of that than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Dr. King and other civil rights heroes taught that unjust laws sometimes have to be broken in order to make civil rights progress.
That is why this Saturday, this gay pride flag I brought from Chicago will fly on the streets of Moscow along with Russian gay pride flags, whether there is permit or not. This is the way that civil rights progress has always been made.
Finally, I would say to the leader of my government, Mr. Obama, it is very easy to speak out in favor of human rights in countries to which you are opposed. It is a far more difficult thing to speak out in favor of human rights at home, and in countries to which you are allied.
Recently Mr. Obama you cut a nuclear arms deal with the Russian government. It is time now to speak out against the ban on Moscow Pride scheduled for this Saturday. Russian gays and lesbians who have been so courageously organizing for their freedom, and the freedom of all Russians, deserve no less.
–Andy Thayer, co-founder of the Chicago based Gay Liberation Network
More statements, pics and a URL for a live blog of events this week in Moscow can be found at
http://tinyurl.com/MoscowNewsConf