One week before the St. Petersburg Gay Pride parade, scheduled this year for June 25, Russian anti-gay organizers staged a rally in St. Petersburg petitioning city hall to ban LGBT groups from city-sanctioned activity.
The violently anti-gay rally, which involved participants draping a coffin in a rainbow flag and then destroying and discarding it in a “symbolic destruction and burial of the movements of perverts,” was led by the nationwide “People’s Cathedral” movement and the conservative social group “Parents Standing.”
Organizers of the rally also petitioned for the resignation of St. Petersburg district head Vladimir Korovin, the city official responsible for permitting a gay rally to take place back in May in honor of the International Day Against Homophobia and Trasphobia. Korovin’s decision to sanction the rally made it the second authorized LGBT public even in the city’s history; but now members of the “People’s Cathedral” and “Parents Standing” are pushing to have any future displays of LGBT Pride or protest eliminated through parliamentary action.
According to the site GayRussia, protestors also called upon the Regional Parliament of St. Petersburg to enact a ban against so-called “anti-family” propaganda in order to prevent “sexual perversion” and protect society from “danger for public morality and a threat for the country’s demographics.”
As yet, city hall officials have not offered any response to the anti-gay petitioners.
