Russian airline forces gay flight attendant to marry a woman

Maxim Kupreev

For all the troubles pertaining to LGBT rights currently going on in certain regions of the Western world, it’s always useful to step back and look at just how far we’ve come. For example, we have laws in place that make it so that, say, companies can’t punish employees for trying to create anti-discrimination alliances by forcing them into sham marriages:

Gay activists in Russia are planning to ask air passengers to boycott Aeroflot, Russia’s leading airline and not to use its services until the creation of equal conditions for all workers.

The call comes following the revelation that gay flight attendant Maxim Kupreev was forced by his employers to enter into heterosexual marriage with his former high school girlfriend following his announcement last year to create an LGBT group within the company to fight for the protection of the rights of homosexual employees.

[…]

According to internal Aeroflot sources reported by GayRussia.eu, 25-year-old flight attendant Maxim Kupreev was given an ultimatum late last year to enter into heterosexual marriage or to lose his job. At the end of 2011 he married his school friend Sofia Mikhailova who got the right to fly Aeroflot for 10% of the fare – and other company privileges.

In order to register marriage with Kupreev, Mikhailova had to dissolve her real marriage to Grigoriy Andreykin. The divorce was finalised on 11 October last year.

‘Aeroflot effectively broke a real marriage and created a sham one,’ Alekseev said.

The fact that Aeroflot management is so ridiculously petty that it would ruin both a young man’s reputation and another woman’s matrimony by forcing them into a publicly humiliating sham marriage, and all over a mere attempt at introducing a little fairness and equality into the workplace, really speaks for itself to the point where there’s precious little to add.

Ironically, though, it’s interesting to note that this sort of bigoted nonsense is exactly what social conservatives are apparently rooting for when they pretend that forcing gays and lesbians to marry people of the opposite gender constitutes “equal rights”, whereas allowing them to wed those they actually love somehow counts as “special rights”. Because if the currently adopted legal definition of ‘marriage’ isn’t strictly the one they prefer, then it must be fake, right?

(via Rob F)

Tags: Aeroflot • Maxim Kupreev • Sofia Mikhailova