From protecting the feelings of believers to protecting the feelings of society

January 23, 2013 members of the Presidential Development Council Civil Society and Human Rights (HRC) Vladimir Ryakhovsky and Iosif Diskin will bring to the attention of the President a new version of the draft law on protecting the feelings of believers, consideration which was previously postponed by Vladimir Putin until March 2013. Authors of the new version of the bill, it is proposed to protect not only religious feelings, but any "feelings that are of high importance for various public groups" cited as examples of patriotism, pacifism and homophobia.

To this end, Ryakhovsky and Diskin propose "zoning" public space, that is, posting warnings about possible insulting feelings in places with "special norms of behavior" (for example, at exhibition halls with scandalous exhibitions).

At the same time, the authors of the bill believe that those who fall under the operation of the law of violation is not imprisonment, but a fine and public works.

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

Opponents of the new version of the bill rightly point out to the fact that the concepts used by its creators are not amenable to strict definition, and therefore cannot be subject to legal regulation. Indeed, not it is quite clear how the authors of the bill intend to draw the line between, say, between patriotism and xenophobia. In general, not all "feelings that have a high significance for different social groups" can be assessed unambiguously, society is characterized by a mass of not the best prejudices, which the state does not should indulge. A striking example of such feelings is the above 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 fall in order to preserve their feelings.

Sources

• Vladimir Gusev. Presidential Council equates patriotism with religious feelings // News. 2013. January 11.