All the things she said.

Remember this song?

It was a monster hit a little over a decade ago. You couldn’t escape it. Every time you turned on the radio or the television, it was bound to show up within about six minutes. Even if you found it annoying, it had a way of affixing itself to your brain. I can still sing you the chorus from memory, and I haven’t even heard it since probably 2003.

Yulia Volkova, the dark-haired half of the group, was recently on a Ukranian TV show. She said if she had a son and she found out he was gay, she would disown him. A man has “no right to be a fag”, she said. According to her, men were created by God to procreate, and to deny that and sleep with other men is a terrible sin. A homosexual man isn’t a “real” man. The audience, apparently in agreement with her, applauded.

She did say it would be okay if she had a gay daughter, because “aesthetically lesbians look much nicer than two men holding their hands or kissing”.

I didn’t realize selective homophobia was a thing, or that what you like to look at determines what is and isn’t acceptable for other people to do.

Then again, this is someone whose entire career was built on the controversy of two teenage girls kissing in a music video and onstage, with her and Lena Katina effectively playing “lesbian dress-up” to sell records. You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and tell it it’s got halitosis.

I guess what she said at the height of her fame about supporting the LGBT community was just PR spin. And I suppose next she’ll claim God appeared to her in a vision and said, “Behold! The gay man shall burn in hell, but the gay woman shall sit at my table forever, for it is mighty fun to watch women kiss! Spread my gospel!”

Seriously. How can there still be people out there who believe this shit? People are attracted to who and what they’re attracted to, for reasons they do or don’t understand. To deny that, or to be made to deny it by others, is the real sin. God, Goddess, Vishnu, Urkel, Giant Running Shoe, Disembodied Generic Head…whatever is or isn’t up there supposedly watching over us has got nothing to do with it.

Your body. Your libido. Your heart. Your business. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, no one has the right to tell you what to do with any of it.

If there really is a heaven and a hell, you know who’s going to that place of burning and pain down below? Hate-spreading homophobes. That’s who.