At Martin Marty's "Sightings," Lariza Resnick points to an aspect of the judge's ruling in the Russian Pussy Riot case that I hadn't seen reported elsewhere:
For Pussy Riot, the "punk prayer" aimed to undo the identification between "normal Russian personhood," Putin's regime, and the Orthodox Church. The mutual constitution of a unified "Russian people" and a unified "Orthodox Christianity" reinforce the legitimacy of Putin's sovereignty along with that of his former KGB colleague Patriarch Kirill Gundyayev. On trial, then, was also the possibility of religious contestation—i.e. that one might be critical of a religious tradition and nonetheless speak for it rather than hatefully against it. As one blogger for Women in Theology notes, the language of Judge Marina Syrova's ruling pits Pussy Riot's feminist commitments against the "antifeminism" of Christianity. Judge Syrova explains that "The court does find a religious hatred motive in the actions of the defendants by way of them being feminists who consider men and women to be equal. Now gender equally [sic] is asserted, maintained by the Russian constitution [...] At the same time, Orthodox Christianity, and Catholic Christianity and other denominations do not agree with feminism and their own values are not in line with feminists."
Playing a theologian or a historian, the Judge publicly establishes a uniform "Orthodox Christianity," whose constitutive feature is an opposition to equality between men and women, so much so that any challenge to this inequality constitutes an act of hatred. (emphasis added)
This is, as Resnick points out, really quite remarkable. Even granted that the relationship between church and state, and between Christianity and society is quite different in Russia than in the United States, it's hard to conceive of the idea that a judge would rule as a matter of law that Pussy Riot's protest represented an "act of hatred" solely on the basis of the principle that it advocates feminism! The idea that it is definitionally impossible to be both "feminist" and "orthodox" (in either the large or small "O" sense of the word) is, on theological grounds, patently absurd. So how much more absurd must it be to see that assertion given the force of law, and then used in order to jail someone?
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