Referring to the Old Testament in the Holy Bible, the Right Sector — which fields a battalion of soldiers to fight against Russia in eastern Ukraine — called gay people “perverts” who “need to be cured” and promised to “prevent this sodomist gathering.”
“There will be thousands of us,” Right Sector spokesman Artem Skoropadskyi told the Kyiv Post.
The parade named Equality March will take place on June 6 in Kyiv.
The organizers keep time and place secret until the last moment for safety reasons.
On the morning of the day of the event, the details of the place and time will be sent out to the participants who registered online.
The annual gay prides are often haunted by ultra-conservatives.
In 2012, unknown men attacked and beat up gay rights activist Svyatoslav Sheremet on the day of a planned gay pride that was cancelled because of security reasons.
Unknown men in 2012 attack gay rights activist Svyatoslav Sheremet.
Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh has promised in a Facebook post that the group’s members will “put aside other business in order to prevent those who hate family, morality, and human nature, from executing their plans. We have other things to do, but we’ll have to deal with this evil too,” he wrote.
Yarosh then upped the stakes by connecting the parade to Russia’s war on Ukraine.
He said that the event would “spit on the graves of those who died and defended Ukraine.”
Echoing Russian rhetoric on the subject, Skoropadskyi said that “gay propaganda is destructive and doing harm to our Christian nation, we can’t allow that.”
President Petro Poroshenko gave his support to the Equality Rights march during a June 5 press conference.
He said citizens have a constitutional right to assembly and that law enforcement agencies would guarantee the safety.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko didn’t share the president’s confidence.
He asked the Kyiv lesbian-bisexual-gay-transgender community to cancel the pride march to avoid “inflammation of hatred” and “not to provoke another confrontation in Kyiv.”
Activists said they would go forward with the march anyway.
Representatives from Germany, France and the European Union in Kyiv had engaged in a diplomatic effort to ensure that police would protect the manifestation, lawmaker Serhiy Leshchenko said.
The Right Sector gained broad popularity in Ukraine playing an active role in the EuroMaidan Revolution.
The group’s intolerance was met with condemnation and disbelief from many Ukrainians, who reacted on the organization’s Facebook page.
“You are properly just a few homophobes who not really represent the Right Sector,” a female wrote.
“Who gave you the right to decide over the streets of Kyiv?” another commentary read.
Oleksandr Zinchenko, a representative of the human rights of the LGBT Centre “Our World,” said on June 3 that 40 hate crimes were committed against LGBT people in 2014. About 10 such crimes have already happened in 2015.
Alya Shandra, a EuroMaidan press coordinator, feels betrayed by the Right Sector’s anti-gay rights stance. She tried to convince the public that the group is not made up of “fascists and demons, as the Russian media called them.”
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