Who regurgitated the Romanov's claim the the Russian throne in the year just gone? Kiril, no less by claiming the "right" of one of them to the Czarist wealth harboured by the Orthodox Church, still. Is he a "father" of a past era despotic "christian" regime, that caused the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions by tyrranically ruled Workers and Peasants, or a nice guy? I think he is getting his just deserts, at last. "Let them be judged by their deeds", suits his situation.

We Christians all around the world are secretly, sometimes opening, being persecuted and yet we still refuse to give up our Faith and our children to the animals that infest the sewers of the world. Live your life the way that you want, but live it away from us. This great society that you today enjoy was built on the blood of Christians. We will not abandon Our Church for any reason and we will protect our Church at all costs. If you have an issue with Christianity, stay home! Unity in Christ. 

I can't think of any democracy anywhere in the world where a church, or any other institution, asks the government for protection against... insults! Defamation is one thing -- as far as I know, all democracies have defamation laws, which penalize the propagation of libel.

Libel is the publishing of false information that is damaging to reputation, and can be objectively measured against verifiable facts. An insult, on the other hand, is a subjectively perceived disrespectful statement or act, and the greater the ego or paranoia of the object, the more delicately poised is its insult threshold.

During Tsarist times, the Orthodox Church made itself an arm of the Tsarist state. For which cause it was persecuted by the Soviet state, and survived by becoming its collaborator and informant. Now it wants to not only revert back to the Tsarist era role, but with the added protection of the intent of the Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda laws.

How about just being a spiritual organisation attending to the spiritual requirements of Russian believers, limiting oneself to just that category of hocus-pocus, and leaving the political mumbo-jumbo alone? ("What a novel idea," I hear the Patriarch respond. "The Church should be a spiritual institution." But I might have been mistaken -- perhaps he didn't respond at all.)