Orthodox Christian group calls for ‘sodomite’ Heated Rivalry to be banned in Russia

Sorok Sorokov, a Russian Orthodox Christian organisation that campaigns for traditional values, has announced that it will be petitioning the Prosecutor General’s Office and Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor to ban Canadian TV series Heated Rivalry from being shown on Russian streaming services.

“Heated Rivalry is a Canadian series where the main characters openly propagate pederasty,” Sorok Sorokov chairman Georgy Soldatov told Russia’s Abzats Media on Friday. “It’s hard to imagine how it was released on Russian online platforms.”

“The series is full of sodomite sex scenes. Russia already has a mortality rate higher than its birth rate, and yet we allow our youth to be shown propaganda of unnatural debauchery,” Soldatov said of the global smash hit show, which centres on a same-sex love affair between two rival ice hockey players, one of whom is Russian.

Soldatov said that Sorok Sorokov would not only ask for the series to be removed from Russian streaming services but also ask the Prosecutor General’s Office and Roskomnadzor to charge any platform that continued to show it.

Russia’s Supreme Court effectively outlawed any display of homosexuality in late 2023, when it ruled that what it called the “international LGBT movement” to be an “extremist organisation”. One year earlier, the country’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, expanded a law banning “LGBT propaganda” to apply to adults as well as minors.

The legislation has led to a crackdown on LGBT life in Russia, forcing nearly all queer establishments to close or move underground, while also leading to people being charged with disseminating LGBT propaganda for action as innocuous as displaying peace flags and even using rainbow emojis in social media posts.