14 DAY TRIAL // In what some would consider blind fear, Russian anti-LGBT lawmaker Vitaly Milonov has openly expressed his opinion that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, should be banned for life from the country for being gay.
Cook yesterday drew massive attention from the media, the tech industry, and everyone in between after coming out as gay in a striking essay published by Bloomberg Businessweek.
In his plea for equality, Cook said, “While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.”
“So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy,” he added a few paragraphs later.
Anti-LGBT and responsible with lawmaking
As you can imagine, the references to God and other sensitive remarks drew the attention of many public figures, and now Russia is having its say through St. Petersburg city council member Vitaly Milonov, who told FlashNord the following:
“What could [Tim Cook] bring us? The Ebola virus, AIDS, gonorrhea? They all have unseemly ties over there. Ban him for life.”
Milonov is known to be anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) and responsible with lawmaking in his country, while Russia’s government is known to regard LGBT as nothing more than Western liberal hegemony. Milonov’s local “gay propaganda” ban spurred a federal law that passed last year.
Milonov owns both an iPhone and an iPad. When his “European homophobe friends” gave him an iPhone 6, he decided it wasn’t safe to use because it was reportedly “too vulnerable to U.S. spying.”
Exactly the type of mentality that Cook meant to fix
It’s hard not to observe that Milonov’s thinking seems to be the very reason why Cook decided to speak out on his sexual orientation as a trivial matter that doesn’t affect who he is as a person, as a CEO, his life's mission, or his ability to do good for the world.
As much as some will support Milonov’s arguments, it is worth noting that pretty much everyone is equally vulnerable to AIDS, gonorrhea, and even Ebola, regardless of sexual orientation.