Pat Buchanan has a man crush on Vladimir Putin, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
The American arch-conservative lauded the Russian president for his crackdown on LGBT people in his own country, saying that Putin was defending “moral clarity” in a world gone mad.
“While privacy and freedom of thought, religion and speech are cherished rights, to equate traditional marriage and same-sex marriage is to equate good with evil,” Buchanan wrote. “No moral confusion here, this is moral clarity, agree or disagree.”
Buchanan, who just last week defended his former boss, President Ronald Reagan, for vetoing economic sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa, said Putin’s Russia had assumed moral superiority over the United States.
“President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire ‘the focus of evil in the modern world,’” Buchanan wrote. “President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century.”
Human Rights Watch charged the Russian leader earlier this year with “unprecedented” attacks against his political enemies, and he’s signed laws outlawing gay “propaganda” and the adoption of children by same-sex couples.
But that’s precisely what Buchanan likes about Putin.
“While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm,” Buchanan wrote.
He said Putin’s views arguably had more worldwide support than America’s libertine elite, citing a recent ruling by India’s Supreme Court upholding a ban on gay sex and street protests earlier this year in France against the legalization of same-sex marriage.
“In the four dozen nations that are predominantly Muslim, which make up a fourth of the U.N. General Assembly and a fifth of mankind, same-sex marriage is not even on the table,” Buchanan wrote. “And Pope Francis has reaffirmed Catholic doctrine on the issue for over a billion Catholics.”
He blamed unelected judges for declaring abortion and gay sex to be constitutionally protected rights, and he complained that judges had been the driving force in allowing same-sex marriage in some states.
Those complaints are ironic coming a column that praises a foreign leader whose most recent election was riddled with fraud and abuse, according to the U.S. State Department.
“America was de-Christianized in the second half of the 20th century by court orders, over the vehement objections of a huge majority of a country that was overwhelmingly Christian,” Buchanan said.
He claims Putin as a Christian because the Russian leader claims to have been “secretly baptized” by his mother and professes a Christian faith.
“He is seeking to redefine the ‘Us vs. Them’ world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent West,” Buchanan said.