RUSH: I’ve got a story here from BuzzFeed on why Russia turned against gays. And it’s actually a pretty fascinating story about Putin. And this story, as far as it goes, makes the point here that Putin decided in the early stages of his reign — that would be r-e-i-g-n for those of you in Rio Linda — that he would rule with no apparent ideology.

“Three months before RussiaÂ’s parliament unanimously passed a federal law banning the propaganda of ‘non-traditional relationships’ — that is, same-sex ones — the billÂ’s sponsor went on the countryÂ’s most respected interview show to explain her reasoning. ‘Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survivalÂ…I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued.'” This is a Russian female lawmaker by the name of Yelena Mizulina. And she told this to our old buddy Vladimir Posner. Did you know Vladimir Posner’s still alive?

Do you know what Vladimir Posner is? Oh, dawn, Vladimir Posner is a former KGB agent who became a go-to guy for Ted Koppel and ABC’s Nightline. He and another KGB agent disguised as an ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, these guys, I loved ’em, they were as American as you and me. I even interviewed, when I went to Sacramento, had my show there, they sent me to Washington. They were so insistent that I do interviews and have guests. So they sent me to Washington for a week, and I did the program from the ABC broadcast center which was on DeSales Street right across from the Mayflower Hotel. And since I had to do this, I wanted to get Vitaly Churkin.

Vitaly Churkin fascinated me. I mean, I tried to imagine what this guy’s childhood had been, when he was first spotted by the KGB or the Politburo as somebody with the potential. He lived out with the natives in Arlington, or McLean. I mean, he was as American as anybody. I asked him, he got the biggest kick out of this. I looked at him dead straight in the eye, and I said, “Are you KGB?” And he just laughed himself crazy, thought I was the biggest kook in the world. He said, “No, that’s the committee for state security, and I don’t have anything to do with that. I’m at the embassy.”

But Vladimir Posner and Churkin, they were in America at pretty much the same time. Yeah, yeah, Posner eventually teamed up and cohosted a show with his communist buddy Phil Donahue. Do you remember this now on MSNBC? Back when MSNBC actually had an audience. I mean, there was a time when MSNBC was worth watching. It was ’92 to ’95, it was a legitimate news network. They did news during the day. They had the right kind of synergy with NBC News. I thought they had tremendous potential, what they were trying to do. And then it all went to hell. Snerdley screened a couple radio shows over at MSNBC at that time. One time Chris Matthews guest hosted this show, before he went Looney Tunes on everybody.

Anyway, Posner was a regular guest on American TV, PBS, ABC, Nightline. Vladimir Posner was unabashedly pro-Soviet, anti-US, hated Reagan, loved Gorbachev and all these Soviet leaders. I look back on these guys now and I have all kinds of affection for ’em now looking back, but they were good. They humanized a despotic regime like nobody ever has. Vitaly Churkin and Vladimir Posner were able to make the Soviet Union look like a paradise, when of course it was the exact opposite. It was a Third World country with a superpower military, is what it was. And I hadn’t heard of Vladimir Posner in years. I thought he was Phil Donahue’s majordomo up at his estate there in upstate New York with Marlo Thomas. But apparently he’s back home, and he’s got a TV show now.

So, anyway, I’m sorry for the distraction, I just had to do this little stream of consciousness about these guys. I mean, Vitaly Churkin even looked like — I mean, Wall Street, Ivy League, you know, blue-blood American elitist. Sounded like one, too. They were good. They were superb, and of course the US media loved ’em, too, and Posner was just everywhere.

I think I was on the Donahue show with Posner one time, when Posner was trying to tell me — I forget what the subject was. This is too long ago. But I was making a point about something, and Posner said, “You can’t say that. That don’t work. That kind of thinking doesn’t work.” And he gave me a supposedly logical progression of things that make no sense whatsoever. He’s smiling at me laughing all knowingly like I was a cub student getting D’s and F’s not knowing what I was talking about. But I didn’t back down from it.

So, anyway, Vladimir Posner is interviewing this Russian lawmaker, female, Yelena Mizulina. And she said that — this is, again, why Russia turned against the gays. “‘Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survivalÂ…I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued.’

“Mizulina heads the DumaÂ’s committee for family, women, and children and has become the stern face of RussiaÂ’s campaign against gays. But she would never call it that. RussiaÂ’s new laws — banning same-sex foreign couples from adopting Russian children in addition to banning LGBT advocacy — are part of the countryÂ’s very search for survival, according to her.

“On the one hand, thereÂ’s its physical survival — RussiaÂ’s birthrate plummeted in the wake of the Soviet collapse and encouraging baby-making (through government grants as well as rhetoric) has been one of Vladimir PutinÂ’s hallmarks. And then thereÂ’s its moral survival; if Russia is to survive as Russia it needs to reject the corrupting influences of the West.” And so this is why there is a ban on homosexuals in the Olympics in Russia next year.

Now, you can say what you want, but I often, when I make speeches, and I’ve brought it up on the program, too, I’ve asked question: “How is it that a country like ours, less than 250 years old, has come to dominate the world in every way, unlike every other nation, including nations, civilizations that have been around thousands of years. How was that possible?”

I think it’s a great think piece, and it’s fascinating, the answers you get back from people once they start thinking about it. You hear freedom. You hear acknowledgement of a creation by God, natural yearning of the human being as created is to be free, you hear the Constitution, Founding Fathers, all this. But one of the keys, folks, is population. A great country needs a lot of people. A lot of productive people. Now, there are exceptions, but not really.

You can go back to Japan in the eighties, well, they were ruling the roost, but they were not a superpower, and, by the way, Japan cannot, to this day, as per the surrender terms, World War II, the Japanese cannot build an offensive military of any kind. They are not allowed to. So the Japanese were never a superpower in that sense. You might say the British Empire. Yeah, the British Empire was huge, but in order for the British Empire to be huge, the British had to essentially — I don’t want to say conquer, it’s not what they did, but the colonial era, I mean, the Brits rules a number of countries.

We didn’t have to do that. We did it within our contiguous 48 states. Now, one of the reasons is population. Our population, shortly after the founding, just grew at geographic proportions. As the country spread from east to west, the population just blossomed, and this is why countries, you start talking about demographics, are very concerned about the replacement birth level, replacement rate. Does your country have a birthrate that will maintain the current population or grow it.

Now, the politically correct left has been on an anti-population movement, well, for a long time. I mean, the intense portion of the left’s anti-population movement began in the late sixties, early seventies. Coinciding with the modern era of feminism, by the way, and coinciding with a number of fundamental leftist precepts that exist today. The attack on population was too many people and not enough food.

Not enough water. Not enough this. Not enough that.

All of those predictions have gone by the wayside and they’ve been proven to be totally bogus, totally wrong.

And Putin, to now move to Russia, they had a population dive when the Soviet Union dissolved as, quite naturally, they would. I mean, they lost a number of satellite countries that made up the Soviet Union. It became paramount to rebuild Russia. To establish it as a power, you needed people. You needed a birthrate that was beyond and above replacement levels, and that’s why, folks, whether they would admit it or not, that happens to be…

This female lawmaker in Russia is getting close to admitting it. That’s one of the reasons why there is this move against homosexuality. It does not procreate, and the Russians need people. You need people producing and working and inventing and manufacturing and all of these things. You need people to do this, and you need them productive, and you need them free. It’s a key element when discussing the economic growth and the power of any country.

You can take it deeper and get into, “Okay, well, what percentage of the population is productive?” That’s our problem. More and more of our population is becoming unproductive. More and more of our population’s becoming dependent. It’s a huge, huge problem. This is why Putin is manifestly against abortion. They need people. They want people. They want a growing, productive, thriving population.

Putin wants his country to be big again, and Russia’s birthrate plummeted in the wake of the Soviet collapse. “And then there’s its moral survival,” she said. “If Russia is to survive as Russia it needs to reject the corrupting influences of the West.” Now, that’s actually not new, as a belief system. The Soviet leaders throughout their existence had as an objective to make sure that no evidence of life in the West would ever be seen by their population.

They were telling lies about life in America. They were telling lies about the way people in this country lived, and it must be said that one of the elements that led to the downfall of the Soviet Union was the VHS recorder and tape, the cassette, which allowed people to see TV shows like Dallas. It allowed Soviet citizens to see commercial forces things like blue jeans, and it allowed for Soviet citizens to see what life in America was really all about, and it illustrated that their leaders had been lying to them.

So it’s not new that the Russians would want to suppress the cultural influences of the West. But in this case, the morality being looked at is something that is different and unique from what the suppression of old was. So this is why, in a short little burst here, there is this ban. Not only is there a ban on homosexuality in the Olympics in Russia, you can’t even talk about it in a positive way there. You can’t propagandize it, you can’t promote it, and Russians do not permit Russian babies to be adopted by gay couples around the world.

They’re very serious about it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I just have to laugh at that. I’m looking at Obama on The Tonight Show announcing that he’s canceling the summit with Putin because of the comments made in Russia about no gay athletes permitted at the Olympics in 2014, and I remember all of that folderol during the campaign of 2007 and 2008, with Obama giving Bush all this grief about not meeting with leaders of Iran and not meeting with leaders of other nations that harbor ill toward us. I just remember Obama saying (imitation), “You know, we need to be talking to these people, and I’m the guy to do it. I’m the guy that’ll make them all love us. I’m the guy that’ll make them all respect us. I will bring respect back to this country again. I will make this country loved again.” Yada yada yada. And Bush and his bunch of people didn’t know what they were doing.

Now here’s Obama acting like a little kid. (crying) “Not gonna meet you, to hell with your summit.” I’m using the Obama strategery of 2007-2008. Wouldn’t you engage with Putin and get in his face about this and tell him how he’s wrong? Wouldn’t you use this as an opportunity to lead? But it’s not that. It’s an opportunity to fund-raise for Obama. It’s an opportunity to build another bridge, not that he needs one, to the lesbian, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender group, yeah, LGBT. Another opportunity to build another bridge to that bunch, but here’s a chance to really get Putin and Russia into the twenty-first century, as Obama thinks it should be defined, and he said no, gonna take his ball and go home. Didn’t want to meet with the guy anyway. Don’t care about Putin.