Winter Olympic Gaymes (sic) and other matters.

Congratulations, advocates of gay rights, for letting Vladimir Putin get into your heads, rent-free.

Instead of concentrating on WHY YOU ARE THERE (winning, and rubbing the Russians' faces in the dust on the basis of pure athletic talent), you have allowed yourselves to become preoccupied with an issue which not a whit of your screaming, whining or protesting will affect one little bit.

Why not? Because Vladimir Putin doesn't give a fuck, never has given a fuck and never will give a fuck about what you think. He doesn't NEED to give a fuck and doesn't WANT to give a fuck, except with regard to how thoroughly he can fuck with your heads with the minimum of effort required.

All you've done is to give your own athletes one more thing to worry about while they're there, and politicised an event which should have remained apolitical. He has quite successfully got you playing the man, not the ball, and you will end up losing both battles.

While you are angsting over all of this and focussing on the horribleness of it all and the importance of supporting gay rights etcetera, etcetera, Middle-Eastern autocracies are quite happily going about their business of not just suppressing expressions of homosexuality but actually judicially executing homosexuals purely for being gay, something they've been doing for quite some time without anywhere near as much noise being made.

Meanwhile, gay activists and pro-gay legislators in the US concentrate their attention on such minor details as bakeries and wedding photographers refusing their services to same-sex couples planning their weddings, as if that were the end of the world, and how such terrible, terrible people ought to be obliged to provide those services to said gay couples under pain of criminal prosecution.

There is a world of difference between stating one's moral position by refusing someone a non-essential commercial service on the basis of their sexuality, on the one hand, and arresting and hanging that someone by the neck until dead because the local law demands it, on the other. Simply to label both actions as "homophobia" as if they were morally equivalent is in my opinion intellectually deficient, and to put more effort into punishing the first group than protesting the actions of the second is something I find really quite disturbing.