I thought about that too… Aren’t you strengthening rainbow imperialism by doing this sort of bullshit? You’re essentially giving out ammo like candy to western liberals who are now going to screech even louder - “muh LGBT rights in Ruzzia!”. At the same time, you’re missing out on the opportunity to say “look, the West is full of shit, they only pretend to care about gay rights, but we here don’t do these empty gestures”. Not to mention that innocent LGBT people will get hurt because of this by being a political pawn.
Comrade Lenin said it 100+ years ago about Jewish people - “they are not the enemy, the capitalists are”. A century passes - the game is still the same, they just found a new group to attack.
It’s because “LGBT is imperialism!!1!” is just an excuse. The real reason they are doing this is, simply enough, because Russia’s leadership is very conservative. Conservatives gonna conservative, they just need to present their target minority as a ploy from the enemy and voilà, persecution justified.
