Posted on 09/02/2013 3:53:20 PM PDT by Libloather
President Obama will meet with several LGBT groups during his trip later this week to St. Petersburg, a move likely to ruffle Russian President Vladimir Putin after the recent passage of a series of anti-gay laws.
The president will meet with human rights activists Lev Ponomarev and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, legal aid NGO director Pavel Chikov, and Coming Out, a St. Petersburg-based LGBT organization, according to a report in BuzzFeed.
The decision to meet with the activists in not unprecedented — Obama also met with human rights leaders in 2009 — but comes amid a period of heightened tension with the Kremlin.
During his address on Syria from the Rose Garden on Saturday, Obama blasted the United Nations Security Council as "completely paralyzed and unwilling to hold [Syrian president Bashar] Assad accountable" — a clear swipe at Russia, which has threatened to block any resolution condemning the alleged sarin attack in the Damascus suburbs.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called Secretary of State John Kerry's presentation on the attack "absolutely unconvincing" in a press conference on Monday, according to the Associated Press. He said the U.S. intelligence report included "nothing specific there, no geographic coordinates, no names, no proof that the tests were carried out by the professionals."
And Putin indicated he may send a delegation of Russian lawmakers to lobby the U.S. Congress against any military action in Syria, the Interfax news agency reported.
The skirmish over Syria comes after a summer dominated by a tussle with Putin over Edward Snowden, the former defense contractor responsible for leaking details of top-secret National Security Agency surveillance programs. After more than a month in the Moscow airport, the Kremlin offered Snowden temporary asylum despite protests from the White House.
Russia has also contended with a growing movement to boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi over the new anti-gay laws, which threaten fines and imprisonment for those who stage gay pride rallies or events.
Earlier this summer, Obama said he did not "think it's appropriate to boycott the Olympics" — but said he hoped gay American athletes would win medals and change minds.
"One of the things I'm really looking forward to is maybe some gay and lesbian athletes bringing home the gold or silver or bronze, which I think would go a long way in rejecting the kind of attitudes that we're seeing there," he said.
You are wrong.
Reagan Keeps Focus On Rights President Holds Talks With Soviet Dissidents
May 31, 1988 "MOSCOW — President Reagan, in an emotional meeting with a group of Soviet dissidents, challenged the Soviet government Monday to lift all curbs on freedom of religion, stop jailing people for things they say and write, and allow its citizens full freedom of emigration and travel.
In a meeting with Russian churchmen at a Moscow monastery, the President appealed to Soviet authorities to restore thousands of closed churches as places of worship and defied official sensibilities by quoting Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose writings are banned in the Soviet Union.
total a..
a hookup
I hear you, but by then the Soviet Union was all but finished.
For golf: his putter, their balls.
Barry Sinclair had been watch his fairy ass or Putin will have him arrested. No sodomite democrations of any type are allowed in this Christian Orthodox country.
We do this all the time. When the President or other high ranking official travels to a country that has a poor human rights record, they will meet with dissidents in that country.
If Obama wants to bend over for Russian homosexuals, he should do it on his own time.
I don’t see accommodating sodomites as a human rights issue.
I don’t see accommodating sodomites as a human rights issue.
Maybe he’ll get lucky....
Is bathhouse Barry finally going to come out?
Is bathhouse Barry finally going to come out?
I don’t know, but he sure loves the queers. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Obama and the State Department do along with Congress.
That’s their problem.
That’s our problem.
OMG, Obama is WAY outta bounds, here. He’s acting like the world’s messiah! Oh wait.
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