And let's face it, this solidarity movement with Russia's LGBT community is very ideologically inconsistent. It is very hard to justify taking such a pro-active stance against Russia specifically when much worse human rights' violations are committed by our political allies around the world.
As off-topic as this is, I think I can tackle this, because I have been thinking about this argument myself. Putin said it himself, "There are countries the west is allied with that execute, imprison homosexuals." (paraphrasing) I saw this one Russian bureaucrat in a Vice video defend the law by saying, "It is like being forced to live in a closet - but a very big and comfortable closet." So, true, when Saudi Arabia and Qatar and most of the countries in Africa have even MORE corruption, even MORE human rights abuses, even STRICTER laws against LGBT populations, how do we get on the moral high ground to criticize Russia so heavily?
And I think the reason is expectation. I think basic human rights follows a fairly linear path. You'll notice that a lot of countries that have 'modern slavery' - foreign workers brought in to work for pitiful wages, their passports held hostage, women and children trafficked and sold as sex workers - they are in a state of development that is nowhere near ready to accept equal rights for LGBT people. They are pre-feminism. They are barely post-slavery. Foreigners are abused, women have few rights. Education for women is poor. Most of the population is disenfranchised one way or another. Saudi Arabia prohibits women from driving, used to prohibit women from voting or being elected. When they treat half of the human race so poorly, how can we expect them to treat the marginalized ~10% with equality? It's not expected. Baby steps.
In the Western world we don't have these issues. People don't feel disenfranchised and it's a scandal when they do. Institutionalized racism is fringe and unacceptable. America has a black president, various people of different races are well-represented in powerful positions. Women have equal opportunities and are even slightly over-represented in higher education now. We struggle with minutia like differences in pay on average, but people don't deny these problems and they're talked about openly. So, we are able to focus our attention on the marginalized few remaining in society, at least those who had no agency over that which made them marginalized. So LGBT rights is now important for us, and we expect it to be important, and we expect our leaders to believe that it is important.
Now, Russia. Russia *was* all of these things. Russia is a lot more homogenous than America, Canada, UK, etc but racism isn't that huge. People of different races are seen as a curiosity, but not despised, at least not in my experience. Women have equal rights as men, and hold positions of power. There are still issues for feminists to work on in Russia, but the expectation is that the country has reached the stage where they can finally embrace that final 10%. And what do they do? They take a huge step backwards. They *codify* discrimination instead of outlawing it. The lawmakers themselves say, "You'll be OK if you keep a low profile!"
I am intimately familiar with Russian culture. Outside of Moscow and Peter it is very homophobic, and certainly there is no shortage of it in the cities. But internationally we *expected* Russia to move forward, but they moved quickly backward, and now they have the world stage.
So this is why we don't care as much about human rights in Saudi right now as in Russia. We expected more. At least in Saudi women can vote and run for office now, so they are taking steps forward. It's the step back that hurts, and of course it hurts those affected more.