Everyone has feelings

On January 23, members of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights (HRC) Vladimir Ryakhovsky and Joseph Diskin will bring to the attention of the president a new version of the bill on protecting the feelings of believers, the consideration of which was previously postponed by Vladimir Putin until March 2013, the Information and Analytical Center reports. OWL".

The authors of the new version of the bill propose to protect not only religious feelings, but any “feelings of high importance for different social groups,” for example, patriotism, pacifism or homophobia.

To this end, Ryakhovsky and Diskin propose “zoning” public space, that is, placing warnings about possible offense to feelings in places with “special standards of behavior” (for example, near exhibition halls with scandalous exhibitions).

At the same time, the authors of the bill believe that violations covered by the law should be punished not with imprisonment, but with a fine and community service.

It is still unknown whether the HRC will support the initiative of Ryakhovsky and Diskin. In the Kremlin, as reports , they agree with the idea of ​​expanding the scope of the law, especially in terms of protecting patriotism. Izvestia

Opponents of the new version of the bill, as well as the old one , rightly point out that the concepts used by its creators cannot be strictly defined, and therefore cannot be the subject of legal regulation. Indeed, it is not entirely clear how the authors of the bill intend to draw the line, say, between patriotism and xenophobia. In general, not all “feelings that are of high importance for different social groups” can be assessed unambiguously, according to SOVA experts; society is characterized by a lot of bad prejudices, which the state should not indulge. A striking example of such feelings is the above-mentioned homophobia. Actually, if you follow the logic of Ryakhovsky and Diskin, any modern European state should be considered a zone of “special norms of behavior”, where it is better for fundamentalists, xeno- and homophobes not to go in order to protect their feelings.