captainsblog | Even Stranger Bedfellows (Reply)

A couple of days ago, I posted here about some recent events and writings which questioned, from a Northern liberal perspective, whether our nation would be better off just doing a do-over on the Civil War and letting the Confederacy go its own separate but not-so-equal way. Today, our Friend tilia_tomentosa takes me to a just as odd conclusion about outcomes in international politics: that the right-wing nutjobs of this country might be happier today if we'd lost the Cold War to the Soviets.

The precipitating event for this thought was the latest in a series of homophobic outbursts coming out of the ex-USSR:

An anti-gay activist group said it will picket shops selling milk produced by PepsiCo Inc's Russian subsidiary because they believe that a rainbow on the packaging violates a local law banning homosexual "propaganda".

The milk brand is called Vesyoly Molochnik, which translates as Gay Milkman, though in Russian the word vesyoly does not suggest homosexuality. The group said that it was objecting to the rainbow, which it saw as the international symbol for the gay movement.

The group said on Friday that it has asked prosecutors to take action because the packaging violated the law passed in St. Petersburg in February, which makes it illegal to spread "propaganda" that could "damage the health, moral and spiritual development of the underaged". The offence carries a fine of up to 500,000 roubles ($16,100).

The piece goes on to note that, in Soviet Russia, government screwed YOU if you happened to be born gay:

Homosexuality, punished with jail terms in the Soviet Union, was decriminalised in Russia in 1993, but anti-gay prejudice runs deep and much of the homosexual community remains largely underground.

This has got to pose a conundrum for the wiggiest of the wiggy on our Far Right. After all, what are two of the biggest boogeymen in my lifetime to that crowd? Commies and fags. (George Carlin once observed this, using that f-bomb, in noting he was once excoriated as a "commie fag junkie." This led him to speculate what a CFJ would look like; immediately, he held up an imaginary joint, flicked his limp wrist, and lisped, "Workerth of the world unite.")

Turns out the godless Commies were harder on homosexuals- okay, tougher- than even we were at the time. Our antiquated sex codes punished all kinds of gay behaviors, but never did they impose penalties for just being that way.

Considering how sympathetic the wingnuts are to that kind of punitive attitude, and considering just how the strongest of conservatives have gotten in the sack with the Chinese Communists, loving their wage-slave business models, the Republicans doth protest Communism too much, methinks.

In fact, I have in my hand a list of 205 cases of Republican senators, corporate CEOs and Baptist ministers who have more in common with the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties than they do with the values of Washington, Jefferson and Jesus.