Russian authorities have halted adoptions of Russian children by Swedish same-sex couples, reports Swedish newspaper The Local. A spokeperson for the Adoptioncentrum agency told Sveriges Television (SVT) “It’s terrible. We have 13 children in Russian orphanages today who have been offered to parents in Sweden who they have actually met.”
My question: Might Swedish global superstore IKEA, which has locations in Russia and has been a long-time supporter of LGBT families (through advertising and in-store imagery), put pressure on the Russian government in some way?
Additionally frightening: The president of the U.S.-based National Organization for Marriage, Brian Brown, traveled to Russia in June and spoke at “a joint meeting on changes in international adoption laws with the Duma’s committee on foreign affairs and its committee on family, women and children — whose chair, Yelena Mizulina, authored the ban on gay ‘propaganda’ and the adoption bill,” reports Right Wing Watch (via Bilerico). Among other things, Brown told the committee:
We have actually seen that in some schools, they are talking to children about homosexuality, but in fact they don’t have the right to learn about a lot of things like that until a certain age.
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I think that this visit, the invitation to visit Russia, will enable the development of this movement around the world. We will band together, we will defend our children and their normal civil rights. Every child should have the right to have normal parents: a father and a mother.
No. Every child should have the right to a parent or parents who cares for them and wants to raise them with love. Thirteen children have just lost that opportunity. And LGBT families, including LGBT parents, our children, and increasingly, our grandchildren, are already a movement around the world. Brown and the anti-gay politicians of the Duma are a danger, to be sure, but I have to believe that we are stronger.