Our best effort to ignore the winter olympics at Sochi, Russia are not working as well as we thought they will, first there was the fifth olympic ring that did not “open” up as the others did, just to show the good people of the world that no matter how hard you try, both in the natural world as well as the technological one, we are not living in an homogeneity like universe , meaning some things are different to others – which makes life better – not worst.
And now it looks like President Putin, who is (now) famous for his anti-gay opinions (and sadly, actions) is trying to find a way out of the homophobe closet he built for himself. It appears as though the highly involved president of Russia visited a night club in the Olympic village yesterday and paid compliments to a openly gay gold medal winer from the Netherlands.
Even more surprising is the fact that Russia and the Netherlands have been on a thin line of tension in the last couple of months, with the open minded and liberal Dutch stretching the diplomatically possible to a fine limit, with an arrest of a Russian diplomat on its soil and an incident with a Dutch vessel on Russia’s water.
The Global public scorn at the aggressive antigay actions in Russia could have led Putin to change his mind about this issue, and what better way to show it then by hugging an openly gay Dutch gold winer. As long as Russians come back to their senses and stop this middle ages behavior it does not really matter what brings the change – there is some light in the end of this tunnel.