This Russian TV host is offering gay people a ticket out of the country

A radical Russian religious television channel is offering to buy one-way plane tickets for gay people who want to leave the country.

The controversial proposal comes from Tsargrad TV, a channel noted for its support of Vladimir Putin and its anti-LGBT stance.

The channel posted a video on their Facebook page earlier this week, in which host Andrei Afanasyev said the following.

Just recently, California - the most liberal state in the USA by the way - proposed to facilitate the granting of green cards to Russian perverts.

The staff of Tsargrad TV support this initiative.

Moreover, we are ready to pay for a one-way ticket to anyone who plans to emigrate in complete earnest, and can provide a medical certificate proving that they are sodomites or have other forms of perversion.

We really want you to move there, where you can openly submit to your sins.

Although the move would be considered insulting by most people, Tsargrad have insisted that they merely 'want to do good'.

However, in the unlikely event that anyone would take up this offer, they wouldn't need to obtain a medical certificate as sexual orientation is not a disease.

Tsargrad, which claims to have a quarter of the Russian population as viewers, primarily promotes a Christian Orthodox outlook.

Their Putin-supporting founder, Konstantin Malofeev, is a successful businessman who has compared Tsargrad to the Fox News channel in the United States.

Homophobia is rife in Russia, and upheld by the political climate - earlier this year it was reported that gay people were the subject of a purge in Chechnya, where they were stripped, beaten and electrocuted leading to the deaths of 26 men.

HT BBC News

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