A great deal has been made of Obama's invocation of gay and lesbian rights as a reason to chill relations with Russia.  Without getting into Snowden or Syria, it is the epitome of bad faith for Americans to slam Russia based on their laws regarding homosexuality.  Here is why.

As this LifeSiteNews article points out, the law at the center of this controversy imposes a penalty of roughly US $156.00 on people who promote the gay lifestyle to minors.  In California, there is currently a law forbidding mental health professionals from promoting the ex-gay lifestyle to minors.  Similar laws are now pending in Massachusetts and New Jersey.  Since anyone counseling minors to avoid homosexual inclinations would be breaking these state laws, he or she would be a criminal and a derelict professional, subject (I presume) to losing his or her license.  Hence, such professionals face penalties far more severe than $156.00.

African-American Christians like Crystal Dixon, Julea Wade, and Angela McCaskill have been driven out, or almost driven out of their careers, for making even the slightest statements questioning the notion that homosexual acts are natural-born civil rights equivalent to the rights of black people to overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow.  Despite the lack of any scientific evidence that homosexuality is biologically inborn, and in spite of copious evidence that sexual orientation exists on a spectrum (hence the oft-forgotten B in LGBT), gays and lesbians remain a "protected class" in many jurisdictions.  Therefore, people who criticize their lifestyle are constantly at risk of being fired or suspended without pay -- or else hounded in the court of public opinion -- resulting in financial losses far in excess of $156.00.

Regarding freedom of the press, let's get serious.  The Pew Center has already exposed the reality that objections to same-sex marriage have been buried under massive pro-SSM propaganda throughout the press.  I sent off editorials, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces to New York Times, Washington Times, Washington Post, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Salon, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, Mother Jones, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal...and about thirty other news organizations, laying out the case for male-female marriage based on the human rights question of a child's natural-born entitlement to a mother and a father.  I may have missed it, but none of those publications ever published a piece by a child of a same-sex couple offering criticisms of same-sex parenting, which is what I was offering.

None of those pieces was ever printed.  Not one.  Could it be because I am on the "commentator accountability" list for a prominent gay advocacy group?  Coincidence?  The gay advocacy groups that determine these blacklists are big-time bundlers for the Democratic Party.  So yes, that's state censorship.

I was interviewed by local press in Minnesota during that state's fight over gay marriage.  I must give credit there.  But at the national level, and in many states, there is a clear omerta against anybody who has a sexual ideology that departs from homosexual orthodoxy.  For instance, the notion that you can choose not to practice homosexual acts -- forbidden, by law, in the largest continental American state, when speaking to a minor.

Ironically, I have been interviewed by Russian reporters repeatedly.  Their concern about gay adoption spiked with the news about Mark Newton and Peter Truong, two gay men who purchased a Russian baby and exploited the child for years as an international sex slave.  That case was so egregious and disgusting, I honestly can't blame the Russians for wanting to say no to the international regime of gay adoption and artificial reproduction technology for same-sex couples.  Newton was celebrated in the Australian press as the quintessential loving gay father.  You won't hear about the Newton case in the mainstream American press, for obvious reasons.

So are we really the ones to cast aspersions on Russia when it comes to free speech?