A Kazan-based website called “MyLinker” is stirring controversy in Russia with a service that supposedly calculates the number of LGBT persons in cities around the country, in an effort to help people evade anti-discrimination policies by homestay networks like Airbnb.
In Moscow, for example, the website says there are “173,851 gays,” and warns visitors, “Oh my! That's a lot of gays! Danger!” while offering help in “fending off the gays.”
Scrolling further, visitors to MyLinker are told that “AirBnb cleaned up and deleted all the owners who refused to rent to homosexuals,” before getting the sales pitch: the homophobes re-registered with MyLinker, the website claims.
“You probably don't want to cradle your child in a bed where a bunch of gays were just frolicking about,” MyLinker says.
Search a smaller city on the website, however, and you get different results. The city of Izhevsk is supposedly “just a little gay,” though visitors are still invited to register their email addresses with MyLinker to receive discounts on local accommodations.
The website's questionable methodology for “measuring gays” relies on tracking the number of online requests for pornography in a city and compares it to the number of Internet searches for gay porn, and then applies the differential to the city's total population and “calculates” the LGBT population.
In an interview with the tabloid Life on Tuesday, a representative for MyLinker said the service is a response to backlash against anti-discrimination policies like Airbnb's ban on refusing to rent to members of the LGBT community. “Denying gay people is fine, if we're talking about the freedom of choice,” Rodion Kadyrov told Life.
A woman named Maria Andreeva disagrees, and has already launched a petition on Change.org to ban MyLinker as discriminatory, also arguing that the website's “gay population measurements” are also probably wildly inaccurate. At the point of this piece's publication, just 650 people had signed the petition.
10 comments
I love gay people, in fact I always thought I would be happier if I could just marry a gay man even though I’m a straight woman. We could check out dudes and go shopping together and he would understand my feelings and we wouldn’t have to have sex. Plus he’d probably be great at decorating and cooking it’s like the wife I wanted when I was dating straight guys and wishing there were two of me to split the exhausting work of being a traditional female. However, this is where the lefties go wrong and this is why they are losing to peeps like trump and his supporters. People are sick and tired of the political correctness. There is nothing wrong with some people not feeling comfortable around gay people. They the right to feelings and the right to respect them. This cultural rape that lefties (I call them libtards because they are not real liberals but fascists in disguise) ….this cultural rape is just wrong to be shoving down people’s throats day in and day out. Nobody, at least not a fundamentalist, doesn’t give a rats ass what you and another consenting adult do in the privacy of your own home but you don’t have the right to be shoving it in people’s faces. That’s like if you don’t like to eat anchovies and I love anchovies and because I love anchovies I start pushing them on you and start calling you a bigot for not liking anchovies. Grow up and learn to respect people, respect boundaries. I’m a classic liberal and what the libtards is doing is completely immoral. Yes, gay people have rights but they don’t have the right to shove their beliefs and desires onto others who do not share the same feelings. You wouldn’t like it if a religious person or a straight person shoved their beliefs and preferences onto you. Empathy people! For fuck sake why the hell can’t you humans get your heads out your ass for once and stop repeating the same mistakes. History is repeating itself, fucking learn and evolve already.