by Rex Wockner
International News Briefs
Anti-gay Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled a statue of presumably gay poet Walt Whitman at Moscow State University on Oct. 14.
Luzhkov has banned gay pride events for the past four years in Moscow, sent riot police to violently arrest people who violated the bans, and called gay parades "satanic" and "weapons of mass destruction."
Moscow Pride organizer Nikolai Alekseev unsuccessfully had called on Clinton "to publicly express her position on gay rights to one of the top homophobic politicians in Europe."
"I think that no one would understand her silence on the breach of fundamental rights of LGBT people in Russia (on) the day she inaugurates the monument to a gay poet together with the homophobic mayor of Moscow," he said.
Last June, in her gay pride month statement, Clinton vowed: "Gays and lesbians in many parts of the world live under constant threat of arrest, violence, even torture. The persecution of gays and lesbians is a violation of human rights and an affront to human decency, and it must end. As Secretary of State, I will advance a comprehensive human rights agenda that includes the elimination of violence and discrimination against people based on sexual orientation or gender identity."
