Posted by Ilya Somin: Sinner Casts Stone: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_09_30-2007_10_06.shtml#1191419102
Alexy II, Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church recently made [1]a speech before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe denouncing homosexuality as "an illness" and a "distortion of the human personality, like kleptomania." He also claimed that homosexuality is part of "a new generation of rights that contradict morality, and [an example of] how human rights are used to justify immoral behavior." Such homophobia is hardly unique to Alexy and his Church. However, they are in a particularly poor position to lecture the Europeans on human rights in light of the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church is [2]hand in glove with Vladimir Putin's repressive regime, endorsing that government's authoritarian policies, and even using the power of the state to[3] harass rival churches and [4]suppress art it disapproves of. Unfortunately, the ROC's current policies are an extension of its long and disreputable history of collaboration with both czarist and Soviet tyranny in Russia. Although there were certainly individual priests and lay activists who who became dissidents, the ROC leadership mostly supported the communists once the latter consolidated their grip on power and removed those priests and bishops most opposed to their rule. As [5]the Library of Congress puts it, "the church espoused and propagated Soviet foreign policy and furthered the [forcible] Russification of non-Russian believers, such as Orthodox Ukrainians and Belorussians." There is, perhaps, a limit to the amount of condemnation the ROC deserves for its record in the Soviet era. Open resistance to the communists would have landed anyone engaged in it in a Gulag or worse; that degree of heroism might be too much to expect. However, the fact remains that the ROC collaborated with the communists to a much greater extent than most of the Soviet Union's other religious groups (many of which engaged in active or at least passive resistance) and its record also pales in comparison with that of the Catholic Church in Eastern Europe, which played a leading role in organizing resistance to communist rule. The ROC's conduct under communism may deserve only limited censure, but it certainly does not justify placing any confidence in the Church's moral judgment. And today, the ROC should reexamine and repudiate its past and present collaboration with tyranny before its leader presumes to lecture the Europeans on "morality" and human rights. References 1. http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2007/10/03/top_russian_patriarch_assails_homosexuality/ 2. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1622544,00.html 3. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/july-dec97/russia_9-29.html 4. http://inblick.org/?p=/2articles/13/simons.html 5. http://countrystudies.us/russia/38.htm _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
