My essay on the issue of whether to allow a gay pride parade in Moscow, which was run on GayRussia.ru (also on Cato.ru), has now been translated into Arabic. (If you use Adobe to read it, you may need to load up the Arabic character set.) I hope to have it out in English soon.
Cato.ru is running a series on civil society, which includes interviews of the leaders of the Russian drug reform movement, the drivers’ movement (they’re protesting the jailing of a man whose “crime” was to be hit by a car carrying the Governor of one of the Russian republics, who died in the crash his driver caused), a leader of the movement for the rights of gay people in Russia, the leader of the classical liberal faction of the Moscow City Duma, and more. Similarly, the Lamp of Liberty is also promoting a policy of toleration, freedom, and justice for all. The Lamp of Liberty will be running a series of interviews with Arab liberals in the coming months.
Tom,
This is a truly great issue for you to address. What better barometer could there be to see how well a given society respects personal freedom than this.
I hope you have the opportunity to hear back on the responses to this. Not long ago, I reprinted an essay by the great English classical liberal, Harriet Martineau, on how to evaluate any given society’s respect for personal freedom http://classicalliberalism.blogspot.com/2005/07/idea-of-liberty.html (I believe you commented on this at the time). You have done her proud!
Just a thought.
Just Ken
kgregglv@cox.net
http://classicalliberalism.blogspot.com/
Thanks, Ken. It will be interesting to see the reception. I think that such issues — the treatment of women and minorities — offer a reasonably good metric of freedom generally.
In our Russian site we are doing interviews with a wide variety of reformers in Russia. It forms a series on the movement for civil society. We are also undertaking an extensive set of interviews with Arab reformers, which will be published as a series on the Lamp of Liberty.