..I agree, the laws made to protect children from perversion are good, GREAT laws. Children are too young and innocent and do not need to learn about homosexuality or any of the sexuality from those who promote such lifestyle choices. The laws are made to keep the children's minds pure and safe from such influences.

For a law to be justified, it should be necessary and in the public interest to begin with. Therefore, for this new Russian law banning "promotion of homosexuality to children", to be necessary it must be to stop something that was happening that needed to be stopped, and the thing that needed to be stopped must be shown not only to have been occurring in the first place, but to be harmful, in this case to children, if it continued.

So I have to ask, where in Russia was homosexuality ever being promoted to children, and by whom? And what were the results of doing so? No cases were ever adduced to the Duma to show that this was going on and needed to be stopped, and why it was just "homosexual propaganda" and not "heterosexual propaganda" that was going on and needed a new law to stop it.

I don't support any kind of propaganda being foisted upon children. I want them to develop as fully rounded human beings naturally, no matter whether they are homosexual or heterosexual.

So given that there was no "homosexual propaganda" being foisted upon children in the first place, what was the Duma's motivation for singling out homosexuals as uniquely a source of propaganda, and not heterosexuals? What evidence was there anyway, that you could even persuade a heterosexual child to become homosexual through the means of propaganda, or vice versa for that matter?

The answer is, there was none, and there is none, and there never will be any. This egregiously manipulative law was unanimously passed with popular support at the behest of the Russian Orthodox Church as a stamp of moral disapproval and animus against gay people, to make them appear a danger to children, to make it appear that we are trying to engineer children into "becoming" homosexuals for nefarious, but never stated motives. This was one of the ways that Nazis fomented hatred against Jews, by representing them as "a danger to children".

The effect of this law is that it is now in practice, illegal to be openly gay or to discuss homosexuality in public. It is a criminal offence to provide support services to gay teenagers when they are at their most vulnerable through familial and peer rejection. It could rationally be argued that an openly gay athlete winning a medal in front of children would be committing this diffuse crime of "homosexual propaganda", and it could in time be construed to be the same for a gay couple holding hands publicly in the street.

This law should be anathema to all Russians, but they have been lied to through and through. They are clearly not seeing the half of its consequences for LGBT Russians, which we are seeing daily here in the West, because their government censors the media, such that homosexuals can be held up as pariahs, an endlessly renewable resource to blame everything on, from earthquakes to the economy.

Once the Russian people have gotten used to being able to discriminate without legal censure, against gay and lesbian people, the government will pass more severe laws. Putin will find a legal means to give himself a fourth term. Already the arrests have begun with a Dutch film company arrested, jailed, fined and then deported for making a documentary about the "homosexual propaganda" law.

There's not a question in my mind but that the IOC must forthwith remove the Winter Olympics from Russia and relocate to a friendly country that recently hosted the Olympics, such as Greece (who need the money anyway) or the United Kingdom or Canada, and that does not have laws criminalising homosexuality.

Homosexuals are an easy target because Putin knows we are too small in number ever to be able to defend ourselves against the Tyranny of the Majority. Once you allow one disliked minority to be stripped of some and then one by one eventually all of their civil rights, you can be next. Whatever civil rights you believe you now have, prepare to lose them as Putin becomes more and more like an amalgam of Hitler and Stalin.

People of Russia, you have been warned.