Like so many radical conservatives, Putin seems to think making something legal will cause everyone to do it.
Vladimir Putin insists the if his country made same-sex marriage legal, a demographic nightmare would ensue, causing a huge population drop because Russians would stop having babies. This ludicrous public policy was revealed in a lengthy profile of the relationship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and UK Prime Minister David Cameron, published this past weekend by the London Daily Mail.
The revelation came in 2013 during a conversation between the two heads of state. Cameron was in the middle of pushing for same-sex marriage while Putin was ramping up his anti-gay homophobia and enshrining it into law.
“The conversation takes a bizarre twist and they end up having a ‘bickerfest’ about gay rights, both wanting to have the last word,” the Daily Mail reports.
“Cameron is riding a high horse, using arguments fresh from his jousting on gay marriage back home, while Putin argues that Russia’s future demography will have problems if gay people are allowed to marry each other, and that the country will not have enough children to secure its future.”
Of course, same-sex couples actually often make and have children, so the claim is ludicrous, but so is the idea that if something become legal everyone will do it.
Putin’s statement is similar to ugly theories of a “demographic winter” popularized several years ago by the religious right, including Maggie Gallagher. Their idea is conservatives have to make more babies than liberals in order to ensure conservative ideals are propagated by more people – as if everyone born into conservative families stays conservative.
“Demography could be destiny,” Gallagher wrote in 2009.
“If there is one force that directly contradicts the inevitability [of same-sex marriage] argument, it is that traditionalists have more children. Preventing schools and media from corrupting those children is a problem, but not necessarily an insoluable one.”
“Religious groups are increasingly focused on the problem of how to transmit a marriage culture to the next generation,” she claimed.”
The Daily Mail article is a serialized excerpt from a new book by Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon, Cameron at 10: The Inside Story 2010-2015.
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