I’m surprised the nobody’s commented on this yet. So I guess I will, even though I’m the sort of person who doesn’t give a damn about sports. And Moderators, I hope you won’t move this thread to the Sports section - this is really about the politics, not women’s figure skating or bobsledding.
So what I’m seeing from the Western countries is a lot of hypocrisy concerning the Winter Olympics games in Sochi. All kinds of finger-wagging at Putin’s Russia, and boycotts no less by Obama and other Western leaders.
The supposed justification for all this is because Russia doesn’t have gay marriage (yet), and passed a law making it illegal to “propagandize in favor of gay marriage.” Also, Putin is a dictator.
While I am not a fan of Putin (and I criticized him heavily for what he did to Pussy Riot), I can’t help but see a lot of hypocrisy. Less than half the countries attending these Olympic games have legal gay marriage. There are some countries (mostly Muslim, but also fundamentalist Christian) where gays are executed. Even the USA only got a sort/of legal gay marriage last year when the Supreme Court struck down the DOMA - actually less than half the US states legally permit gay marriage, but with DOMA struck down they are forced to recognize such marriages performed in other states. I’m not sure what the current law says in the UK because I haven’t been following it closely, but I’m certain that there was no legal gay marriage in the UK when they had their own Olympic games two years ago, and yet nobody was boycotting them then.
As for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, I didn’t see nearly so much hand-wringing at the time over China’s political prisoners, or press censorship, or lack of political freedoms (at least Russia has elections, however imperfect), not to mention no legal gay marriage in China (or in Taiwan, come to think of it).
Putting aside gay issues for the moment and focusing on human rights in general - I can’t help but think about the fact that the USA has more people in prison than any other nation on Earth, including both China and Russia. There is also the little inconvenient fact that Edward Snowden is currently free in Russia, while there is little doubt he’d immediately be arrested if he set foot in Western Europe or the USA. And then there is Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and other less well-known whistleblowers who are/were in jail or hiding because the US government didn’t want the public to hear what they had to say.
But it certainly is horrible how gays can’t get married in Russia, and Putin is a dictator. Maybe we should consider a preemptive nuclear strike, at least on Sochi.
Ideally, sports and politics should be separated. In practice, that never happens. But if the host country has to be a shining beacon of freedom and democracy, rather few countries could ever hope to host the games.
Again, I scarcely give a damn about sports, and don’t care who wins the most medals. I would not even mind if we did away with the Olympics entirely. But I find the hypocrisy surrounding these games most fascinating. I seem to recall an old expression:
“It’s like the pot calling the kettle black.”