Joly calls out Russians on anti-LGBTQ comments

Social media posts by embassy follow Moscow’s ban on teaching children about homosexuality

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly has had her department summon Russia’s ambassador over social media postings against LGBTQ people.

In recent days, Russia’s Embassy in Ottawa posted on Twitter and Telegram that the West is imposing on Russia’s family values, and that families can only include a man, a woman and children.

The embassy posted images of a crossed-out rainbow flag and Orthodox icons of Adam and Eve. It decried Canada for “conflating the concepts of individual sexual preferences and universal human rights” and repeated old tropes about pedophilia.

The first post appeared Nov. 24, just days after five people were killed in a shooting at a gay bar in Colorado.

The tweets came as Russia expanded a ban on exposing children to so-called homosexual propaganda, meaning that authorities can now prosecute Russians for doing things they argue might entice adults to be gay or transgender.

Canada was among 33 countries that signed a joint statement condemning the legislation, prompting the embassy to push back.

“Our country is not interfering in the Canadian domestic affairs,” the embassy claimed, seeking a “corresponding respectful attitude toward the legislative process in Russia.”

Despite ample documentation of persecution of LGBTQ people in Russia, including forced disappearances in Chechnya, the embassy asserted that “there is no discrimination in Russia with respect to the rights of sexual and other kind of minorities.”

In reaction to the first tweet, Sports Minister Pascale St-Onge, who is lesbian, decried Russia’s treatment of LGBTQ people as “a disgrace and an attack on basic human rights.”

The Russian embassy responded with a photo of the Russian imperial Romanov family, asking St-Onge to “please explore and explain how you appeared in this world.”

The family photo includes Russia’s last emperor, Nicholas II, his wife and their five children, all of whom Bolshevik revolutionaries assassinated in 1918.

“(The) Romanovs’ family photo is a symbol of strong family traditions and an example they presented, as the Orthodox Christians when facing martyrdom,” the embassy wrote Monday when asked to explain the tweet.

Joly’s office said the posts must be called out.

Monday is the third time Global Affairs Canada has summoned ambassador Oleg Stepanov this year. The embassy confirmed Stepanov discussed differing views on Ukraine during the meeting at the department’s Ottawa headquarters.