In a conference call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ekaterina Lakhova, the chairman of the country’s Union of Women and a former MP, accused a Russian ice cream brand of promoting homosexuality after selling rainbow colored ice cream.
Lakhova alleged that the Chistaya Liniya ice cream brand was promoting gay and lesbian “propoganda,” and pushed for Putin to defend Russia’s “traditional values.”
“They’re quietly promoting these nice rainbow colors, using nice words, they’re advertising an ice cream called Rainbow,” Lakhova said, according to the BBC, and suggested that the ice cream might make Russian children more open to the LGBTQ+ community’s pride flag.
Although homosexuality has been decriminalized in Russia since 1993, legislation passed in 2013 outlaws furnishing minors with access to information about LGBTQ+ lives, with offenders facing fines of up to $7,000.
“If there are reasons to believe that something is propaganda for values that are not traditional to us, then it must be managed by society, but not aggressively,” Putin said at the conference.
Armen Beniaminov, vice president of Chistaya Liniya, denied that the ice cream was about promoting homosexuality. “We believe that the rainbow is sunlight after the rain, not the LGBT flag,” he said. “Our company advocates traditional family relations.”
“As the father of a large family, I openly voted for the constitutional amendments specifically because one of them defends the traditional values.”
During the call, Putin also criticized the US Embassy in Moscow for its recent display of the rainbow flag to celebrate LGBTQ+ rights, saying it “revealed something about the people that work there,” according to Reuters. “We pass a law banning the propaganda of homosexuality among minors. So what? Let people grow up, become adults, and then decide their own destinies.”
In a later interview, Lakhova compared the rainbow flag to a swastika. “I don’t like the rainbow, just as I don’t like the swastika,” she said, according to the BBC.
Hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people in Russia are on the rise, according to a report by the SOVA Center, a nonprofit organization that tracks xenophobia and racism in the country. Although the organization notes that there are no official statistics in Russia on LGBTQ+ victims of violence, they found that the number of attacks against the LGBTQ+ community was higher in 2019 than in the preceding year.
According to a 2019 poll, 47% of Russians supported equal rights for gay and lesbian people, with 43% against.
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