Brian Brown’s cause is a loser by any reasonable American standard. He heads the anti-LGBTQ National Organization for Marriage, which has waged a decades-long war to preserve the institution of marriage for heterosexual couples only—no same-sex couples allowed. Brown is among America’s conservative right wingers who have sought validation outside the U.S. after a majority of Americans (along with the nation's highest court) has broadly repudiated his mission in life, writes the Washington Post.
Where oh where has Brown taken solace, you ask.
Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, has visited Moscow four times in four years, including a 2013 trip during which he testified before the Duma as Russia adopted a series of anti-gay laws.
“What I realized was that there was a great change happening in the former Soviet Union,” he said. “There was a real push to re-instill Christian values in the public square.”
By "great" change, Brown presumably means things like Moscow looking the other way as more than a hundred gay men are rounded up in the Russian Republic of Chechnya and tortured or killed.
But it's not just Americans committed to anti-LGBTQ causes who have warmed to Vladimir's Putin's authoritarian Russia, it's also gun enthusiasts, Islamophobes, Christianists—really, anyone who feels oppressed by this diverse nation of immigrants and the fact that their belief system can’t entirely dominate all.
Top officials from the National Rifle Association, whose annual meeting Friday featured an address by Trump for the third time in three years, traveled to Moscow to visit a Russian gun manufacturer and meet government officials.
About the same time in December 2015, evangelist Franklin Graham met privately with Putin for 45 minutes, securing from the Russian president an offer to help with an upcoming conference on the persecution of Christians. Graham was impressed, telling The Washington Post that Putin “answers questions very directly and doesn’t dodge them like a lot of our politicians do.”
Puti's a delight, folks, and the dismal view of '80s-era America that the Russian government is trying to undermine our democracy along with the Western-European alliance is really much ado about nothing.
The growing dialogue between Russians and U.S. conservatives came at the same time experts say the Russian government stepped up efforts to cultivate and influence far-right groups in Europe and on the eve of Russia’s unprecedented intrusion into the U.S. campaign, which intelligence officials have concluded was intended to elect Trump. [...]
“Is it possible that these are just well-meaning people who are reaching out to Americans with shared interests? It is possible,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired from the CIA in 2015 after managing Russia operations for 30 years. “Is it likely? I don’t think it’s likely at all. . . . My assessment is that it’s definitely part of something bigger.”
And in case we had any illusions that racism wasn’t a motivating factor the Russia-right wing alliance—experts say the contact between Russian operatives and disaffected conservative Americans began to increase right around Obama's second run for the White House.
Ya know, it's human nature to both seek out likeminded individuals and find change difficult. People on the left and right both do it. But it takes a special level of rigidity and willful ignorance to develop alliances with world leaders who have pillaged their own country for personal gain and committed well-documented human rights abuses against their own countrymen.
Or perhaps that's giving the Brian Browns of the world too much credit. Maybe he's always thought gays should be subject to torture and murder.
This entire piece is a worth a read, though. Perhaps more frightening than conservative Americans seeking outside validation is the sense that Russians have made a very calculated effort to cultivate these American ties for years.