St Petersburg is a modern city filled with modern people and modern money. But there’s still some of it that’s as backwards as a stone-aged hippy. A statue which was erected by Russian company ZEFS in honour of Steve Jobs has this week been taken down. Why have they removed the over-sized iPhone? They’ve removed it because last week Apple CEO Tim Cook announced he was gay.
ZEFS, or in English – Western European Financial Union, put the Jobs monument up in 2013. The giant iPhone had been happily in situ for months before Cook’s recent sexual revelations.
Despite St Petersburg being one of the most progressive cities in Russia, the law’s the law. Maxim Dolgopolov, head of the holding company ZEFS, said…
Russian legislation prohibits propaganda of homosexuality and other sexual perversions among minors,After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was dismantled pursuant to Russian federal law on the protection of children from information that promotes the denial of traditional family values.
Right, so they’re still stuck in the medieval days I’m afraid. But don’t worry the discriminatory law isn’t actually discriminating according to Putin. Putin, as open-minded as ever says that the law is simply to protect the children. Cheers Vlad.
Even at the time of the monument’s erection at the University campus it ruffled some of the old school’s feathers. A group called Communists of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, who sound like a right bunch of futurists, complained that the statue would scare children and students and that the structure inappropriately “symbolizes the superiority of the American way of life”.
After Cook’s outage last Thursday, ultra conservative St. Petersburg lawmaker Vitaly Milonov (who’s an idiot BTW) called for Cook to be banned from traveling to Russia, telling the Web site FlashNord that he, and other gay people, could bring “the Ebola virus, AIDS, gonorrhea” to Russia. Just wow.
Although this is clearly ridiculous and embarrassing, not to mention downright offensive we must be slow to judge. The southern states of America aren’t much further forward as far as gay rights are concerned and much of Africa is much, much worse. We must also remember that only a few decades ago, here in liberal England, we chemically castrated war heroes for being gay. Modern thinking is maddeningly slow-moving and needs a constant push.
