Russian paratroopers should round up gays for public beatings, lawmaker says
A Russian politician who recently advocated the shooting of animal rights activists has now said that paratroopers should be sent to round up LGBT people and flog them in public squares.
Alexander Mikhaylov, a deputy in the Legislative Assembly of Zabaykalsky Krai, in Russia’s Far East, made the comments in an interview with news site Podyom on Tuesday. The lawmaker, who leads his statehouse’s Ethics Commission, said that he thinks the military should go after both gays and pedophiles to punish them.
“We need paratroopers to seize f**gots and pedophiles,” he stated. “So they can take the f**gots to the square to get whipped by Cossacks.” He claimed that “in Russia butts are made for educational purposes, not lovemaking. And pedophiles – just line them up and shoot them. I hate them.”
Mikhaylov had previously advocated for shooting street dogs, and said that animal rights activists should be given the death penalty because they are a “fifth column,” meaning a group that is undermining a larger group from within.
“I think that it is some kind of foreign project, meant to bring down Russians with the help of dogs,” he said. “So for people who won’t allow street dogs to be liquidated, we must have a legal punishment for them also – line them up.”
The MP later said that he had “lost his temper” when he called for the deaths of animal activists, adding, “we should treat pensioners and children humanely, not dogs. We need to give them money that we are wasting on dogs.”
On Wednesday, Valentina Matviyenko, the presiding officer in the upper house of Russia’s parliament, proposed investigating the possibility of implementing chemical castration for pedophiles, and noted that some other countries, including the UK, already practice it.
