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Comment by seivan | Hacker News Reader

Did you really not expected to get down voted for being completely ignorant about the problems there?

You might want to do some reading up - starting with this 5 series VICE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ_aSl3ktjg

I expected to get voted down. Not because what I posted didn't add value, but because this is the sort of topic I avoid in day to day conversation because it causes fights. There is too much emotion involved.

I am not saying there are not problems. I am saying that the media coverage of it is overblown, and because of that any rational thought or discussion about it is impossible. I provided a link to a document which as I pointed out elsewhere is well written, researched, provides citations and has some reasonable conclusions.

I understand it is hard to remove emotion from this sort of topics, in much the same way that discussions on climate change rapidly spiral out of control.

I had hoped that HN was beyond being a vote brigade and that posting it would produce some reasonable discussion on the topic.

Reasonable discussion? Nothing you said or listed was reasonable.

Read up http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201402/being-gay-...

I agree with you and I want to add that in my view, the idea of something which is so clearly a front-and-center human rights issue, cannot easily be "overblown". Violence against people, discrimination, hate-based crimes - these are all things which rate fairly high on the "worth covering" scale of news media.

I have to ask, what did I write that was not reasonable? I can only assume "blown out of proportion" but I have yet to see evidence to the contrary that the media has not done this.

No, it's not emotion in this case. The paper you linked begins with 100 repetitions of "did you know that the law actually is about children?". To which I have to answer: yes. And more importantly: yes, of course. That (hiding anti-gay legislation behind supposedly anti-pedophilia legislation) is a known strategy. It's actually one of the most disgusting things about this kind of legislation because it sends a message of "the state approves of using gay and pedophile interchangeably". Also the article seems to suggest that everyones afraid of all gay people getting arrested in Russia now. That's not at all the issue. What people (afaik) are afraid of is citizen-on-citizen violence against gay people getting an official stamp of approval. Because hunting pedophiles is protecting children. Please read the following section a couple of times:

> Public actions designed to promote pedophilia, sexual relations with minors,pederasty, lesbianism and bisexuality shall be prohibited.

You see what is missing? Gay. Lesbian? Bisexual? In there. Gay not. Why? The subtext is: it's implied by either pedophilia or pederasty. Yes, those are techniques you find also among American conservatives fighting gay rights. But you know what? Those images and stereotypes can be found all over the world, for centuries at least. But making laws that turn those stereotypes official? Yeah, that's a problem. Not the people being convicted by those laws. The precedence such laws create.

Sorry I disagree. This topic is highly emotional. That's why this thread was identified as a flame war by HN and why there is so much heated discussion.

I agree that there is lots of legislation which uses anti-pedophilia as a way of passing though "Won't somebody please think of the children!" works, and that's why it is used. I disagree with it of course, but yes I am aware of it.

Wait you are saying that by deliberately excluding "gay" then its implied? Sorry but that's a bit of a stretch which I disagree with.

Look, as far as I can tell this law can be boiled down to "We don't want people to force non-traditional marriage beliefs on minors". The specifics of it have issues. I can see how advocating for equality can be listed as a crime based on what's listed there though. Its interesting that the word "propaganda" is used which leaves a fair amount of room for interpretation. Point 3 is the sore point it seems, although I can see why its in there as you would not want to equate child-adult relationships which this would prevent. It all hangs on the word "nontraditional" and "propaganda".

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