The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

Well this is chilling: Right Wing Watch is reporting that Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, secretly traveled to Russia in June to testify in favor of a proposed law barring foreign same-sex couples from adopting Russian children. The adoption ban passed just five days later.

The country reportedly has 600,000 children waiting to be adopted.

Brown traveled to Moscow at the invitation of the Russian Duma, the country's parliament. He and the five French Catholic anti-gay activists who accompanied him were fresh off their stinging defeat in France, where despite their best efforts, they were unable to stop a marriage equality bill from becoming law.

From the Right Wing Watch report:

Le Figaro notes that elected officials at the front of the French anti-marriage movement did not respond to the Duma's invitation to attend the meeting for fear of being "associated with a campaign of homophobia directed by Moscow" but that the name of the far-right Le Pen family "was mentioned several times" at the event.

According to Russian news reports, the French activists and Brown attended two events in Moscow. One was a joint meeting on changes in international adoption laws with the Duma's committee on foreign affairs and its committee on family, women and children - whose chair, Yelena Mizulina, authored the ban on gay "propaganda" and the adoption bill.

The other event was a roundtable discussion on "Traditional Values: The Future of the European Peoples," hosted by the St. Basil the Great Foundation - a Catholic group run by Konstantin Malofeev, the head of a private equity group and spirited anti-gay activist - and also sponsored by the Duma's family committee, the right-wing Center for Social-Conservative Policy, and a new multi-party group of Russian MPs formed, with approval of the Russian Orthodox Church, to "protect traditional Christian values" and fight "aggressive liberalism" inreaction to Pussy Riot's protests. Among the measures pushed by the group was the new law imposing jail time for "insulting religious feelings."

Right Wing Watch notes that NOM did not publicly disclose Brown's trip overseas to stoke the fires of homophobia in Russia and did not respond to a request for comment. But RWW found excerpts of Brown's speech to the Duma posted online. His remarks contained the predictable lie that anti-gay religious organizations in Massachusetts were forced to close down their adoption services after the state passed marriage equality, but they also contained this alarming prediction:

I think that this visit, the invitation to visit Russia, will enable the development of this movement around the world. We will band together, we will defend our children and their normal civil rights. Every child should have the right to have normal parents: a father and a mother.

A brief video clip of Brown speaking on Russian television has also surfaced. Watch it below:

I've tried to listen to Brown's English words underneath the Russian translation, and here's what he appears to be saying: "Right now you're having the fight over the adoption issue, which is connected with the marriage issue. And marriage will be next if you don't stand up for your values now, where we've seen a worldwide attempt to..." [footage cuts out]

Click here to read the full report at Right Wing Watch.

This is stunning news, folks. The so-called "National Organization for Marriage" and its president, Brian Brown, are in bed with Russian state-sponsored homophobia, are again actively participating in the exportation of anti-gay hatred abroad, and are collaborating with foreign governments on the legislative bullying of LGBT people and families.

Tell me, Southern Poverty Law Center, is this enough to finally get NOM certified as an official anti-gay hate group? Because this is what hatred looks like.

h/t: Joe