Another Week, Another Pride
Latvian families will flood a Riga city park with balloons and games to celebrate themselves this afternoon. The second annual Family Holidays aim to promote family values in the Latvian society, just one week ahead of the gay pride parade.
Undoubtedly, churches and conservative religious movements in the country created Family Holidays last year to counterbalance what is perceived as gay propaganda and brainwashing in this very conservative Baltic country.
In the last two years Gay Pride parades organized by the GLBT group Mozaika exposed Latvian intolerance to homosexuality on the international arena.
In 2005, the pride attracted more onlookers than participants. Conservative and uber-patriotic groups on both sides of the political spectrum united to combat the same enemy, homosexuality. Rotten tomatoes and eggs were thrown in.
In 2006, the parade was unlawfully banned because high-ranking officials said it might threaten the peace and stability in the country. Faced with the ban, the group chose to host a conference inside Hotel Latvija. But it didn’t stop defenders of the traditional families to throw bags full of dog feces and sprinkle holy water on the conference participants.
At that time, I blamed the disorder on a Web site called nopride.lv, created to fight promotion of homosexuality in the country. People, wearing white t-shirts with craftily created logo of two men (you can tell they’re men by their stick penises) engaging in sexual acts, stood outside the hotel chanting anti-gay slogans. The red circle around them and red line across the stick men on the logo were meant to show the people’s displeasure with the act.
The creator of the site, Igors Maslakovs says that last year’s disorder wasn’t his fault.
“It wasn’t my goal,” he told this site in a recent interview. “My goal was to stop the gay pride parade.”
Those who were seen responsible for the disorder that day one year are now in court; Maslakovs himself is not part of the proceedings.
Maslakovs opposes the gay pride parade because from his experience with similar events in other countries, gay pride parades have little to do with homosexuality itself, but a lot to do with exhibitionism that men and women use to show their naked bodies in public. For him, gay pride parade is an exported idea for quite, mostly reserved Latvians.
It maybe okay there, but it’s not okay here.
Latvians cannot allow someone from France, UK, or Sweden dictate how we are to live our lives, he said. Most of the participants are speaking English, they’re not Latvians, he says.
“Latvian gays are not obsessed with these problems,” he says.
Each country creates their own rules, he said. France, for example, allows gay parade, but bans gay marriage. In Latvia, which suffered a lot demographically in the last decade, it would be a bad government policy to recognize gay marriage.
“From a medical point of view, not a single person in the world was born of homosexuals,” he said.
Maslakovs, however, draws the line at hating homosexuals themselves.
“No one beats homosexuals on the streets here,” he said. “We’re not hating homosexuals, we’re trying to protect our country with any instruments we have.”
Some scientific research of the public opinion suggests that public tolerance toward homosexuality decreased in the last 12 months. However Latvian society doesn’t support any changes to public policies regarding gays and lesbians in either more conservative or more liberal direction. Overall, compete or partial support for homosexual lifestyle decreased from 62 to 51 percent, according to a recent study (PDF, in Latvian).
This year, the city fathers said there was no reason to ban or postpone the parade, which is scheduled to take place next Saturday at the very same park where the Family Holidays are coming to a close.
May 26th, 2007 at 7.52
I’m not sure I would describe Latvia as a “very conservative” country — rather bigoted when it comes to gays and somewhat racist when it comes to dark-skinned people, yes, but bigotry is not conservatism. But, then, this depends upon what one is ostensibly “conserving” — in the case of growing anti-gay sentiment, it ain’t really “family values” so-called. High divorce rates and industrial abortion give the lie to that. These problems are common in post-totalitarian countries resembling our — Russia, Cuba. For some people, going out of their way to hurl feces at gays is obviously a lot more important than being concerned about orphans or the abuse of children in their homes, or the skin trade. Maslakovs is being disig
nuous, methinks — I personally know someone who was badly beaten last year, and his organization has stoked hatred. Pujats, the Catholic Cardinal, stokes hatred. Indeed, the radical Russkies and the radical Letts can get along with regard to gay-bashing, but that’s no surprise; fanatical Muslims and hardcore Orthodox Jews can find common ground in Israel/Palestine when it comes to hating gays. Among the less radical, it’s polittekhnologiya — I’ve written a bit about it here.
May 26th, 2007 at 12.42
Believe it or not, but I was going to link to your article, Peteris.
“Conservative” is certainly a relative term. By comparison with other European countries in Scandinavia, or in former Western Europe, Holland in particular, we’re very conservative here. When comparing us to folks in Wichita, Kansas, we’d be liberals. I wrote about our family values back in 2005 and I guess I’ll have to write about it again.
May 27th, 2007 at 6.06
I believe Latvia has nothing to do with conservativeness, I actually believe there’s no extremism involved for that matter (I mean among politicians). Just sporadic, omnipresent or the complete opposite: completely absent actions or lack of action of foul language? Yea I just termed explicit hate crimes foul language, I mean Kalv?tis was completely supportive of freedom of speech just before (I’m not sure about the timeline) he decided that the gay pride march is something completely unacceptable. Just like that.
I mean conservative people just as extremists have a stance. Although Šmits actually has a stance (he has alleged toward killing gays, for instance), so I assume, say, it’s 50% plain retardedness and 50% hate crimes, I believe it has nothing to do with politicians being conservative, gay marriage has been on their agenda for some 01 days until they ruled, at their sole discretion, marriage be an economic union solely for reproductive purposes. Latvia still has to uphold [catholic/lutheran/communist/nazi] morals being the last country in the entire galaxy to decriminalize cannabis.. I believe when these issues would actually be on agenda (some 22nd century) then it could be considered a conservative state. Now the best you can hope for is hatred (but it’s still better than randomized speeches).
May 27th, 2007 at 6.43
I wouldn’t call any clear political force a “conservative.” My wording referred to the country in general, compared to the liberal West, when it comes to solving social problems.
I don’t see Latvians in general supporting for example legalization of euthanasia, as it’s done in Holland.
Words often get blurred meaning especially such words as “liberal” and “conservative.”
I think our politicians are not hateful themselves, they’ve become skilled at using that hatred to their advantage.
We’re also confused about democracy as a whole; we think democracy means the rule of the majority, whereas in a democracy, minority is more important than majority and all points of view deserve to be heard.
One thing for sure, we’ve got a long way to go in regards to homosexuality and democratic principles.
June 1st, 2007 at 0.10
It’s just fear and hatred of the other, the strange unknown, the traditionally vilified. But there’s no effort to educate in order to dispel the ignorance and fear. It’s easy to target and scapegoat homosexuals since the government does not set a strong and clear anti-discrimination policy and the church leadership openly advocates discrimination. There’s so little “consciousness raising” in relation to so many issues in Latvia, instead a frightening decent into some backward darkness. It takes brave people to speak up against any discrimination but it appears that homosexuals in Latvia have few unequivocal allies. Latvians have been betrayed by incompetent, inadequate leadership, inspired by neither heaven nor earth. Good luck, Aleks, with your life in Latvia. I’ll be joining you soon but it will be hard to stay for long.