Close your eyes and imagine the following spectacle taking place at the opening ceremony of the Olympic games in Sochi: Vladimir Putin arrives in the stadium looking like a cross between Yul Brynner and Clint Eastwood decked out in his Sunday finest ready to watch his Russian athletes trounce the athletes of the morally depraved and obviously inferior Western nations. He takes his seat just as the long-winded introductions of the Olympic big-wigs finally wind down and the athletes from each country begin to walk onto the field. As the athletes stream onto the field, Putin's face turns bright red and he starts looking as if he just swallowed a peck of pickled habanero peppers. The athletes from all the major enlightened nations on earth are all wearing basically the same attire -- rainbow-colored trousers, rainbow-colored skirts, rainbow-colored jerseys, rainbow-colored shoes, rainbow-colored hairdos, rainbow-colored sunglasses, rainbow-colored ...
What better way for the world's best athletes to show support for their LGBT fellow athletes, than to take a cue from school children who show support for their cancer-stricken classmate who's on chemotherapy by having their own heads shaven as a red badge of courage and a sign of solidarity.
What are Putin's options at this point? Have three fourths of the world's finest athletes thrown in jail, and saddle Mother Russia with a Pariah nation status on a par with that of North Korea, just as Russia is aspiring to find its way back into the community of nations? If all the athletes are branded as homosexuals, can Putin really believe he can build enough gulags to hold all of them?
There is no need for us to boycott the Olympics in Sochi. We can stand toe to toe with a blustering little Vladimir and still allow our athletes to compete. There's no need to back down from him -- we can outsmart him, and let him know that he's the one who put himself into this tiny little box.
I'm not sure where the right forum is to propose this idea to those who are in a position to take the ball and run with it. But if you know someone who is in such a position or know of a blog where such folks congregate, please feel free to copy and share these words with them. Maybe we can take some of the Adolph Hitler strut out of mister Putin's swagger and convince him that the more he throws his weight around, the more of a buffoon he makes of himself and the weaker he makes Russia in the eyes of the world.