State Duma and Justice Ministry to introduce bill on “what is good and what is ...

The State Duma and the Justice Ministry will introduce a bill on “what is good and what is bad,” lawmaker Nina Ostanina said.

She called the LitRave event, held over the weekend at the Russian State Library, a “desecration” and complained that Russia had no law that “would prohibit this.”

According to her, “there were doubts” about whether a law defining “traditional values” was needed, but “for some people, this turned out not to be obvious.”

“That is why we are now working with the Justice Ministry on a bill so that people understand, as in Marshak and Chukovsky, what is good and what is bad. If they are not absorbing it with their mother’s milk, from their teachers’ words and from what they consume here in the public sphere—from the media, from books—fine, then let’s do it through the law,” the lawmaker said at a meeting of a working group of the Duma Committee on Family Protection.

Ostanina told the publication Podyom that all “traditional values” had already been defined in Putin’s relevant decree and would simply be incorporated into federal law.

“We are talking about the same values shared by every reasonable person, values that exist among every people today. And Presidential Decree 809 clearly sets out these values. But today it is a presidential decree—obviously, that is not enough. They need to be written into law so that there is an understanding later of what we condemn. At present, the only things we classify as nontraditional values are propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations and propaganda of childfree ideology. And the interpretation that this violates our traditional values is fairly loose. So that needs to be spelled out. Because a decree is not a directly applicable law. But a federal law is already a directly applicable rule, violation of which carries a penalty, either administrative or criminal,” Ostanina said.

Asked what exactly the penalty might be, Ostanina replied:

“Let’s not make predictions in advance. For example, we have criminal liability for propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.”