Russia has become a dangerous place for dissent. Its ex-KGB president, Vladimir Putin, has accomplished what Republicans in America only dream of: he's built an electoral majority by appealing to the most religious and conservative elements of society, including by courting the alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church. With his victories, he's becoming increasingly autocratic, dispensing with even the pretense of democracy.

Besides his notorious sidestepping of term-limit laws, he's presided over show-trial prosecutions of political opponents and reformers on flimsy or trumped-up charges. He's brought down the wrath of the state against artists who mock religion. He's looked the other way as crusading journalists have been brutally beaten and murdered, and his government may have been directly involved in at least one such killing. In the classic tactic of dictators everywhere, he's diverting attention from his own authoritarianism by painting a marginalized minority as a powerful and sinister enemy corrupting society from within. In this case, the invented enemy is Russia's LGBT community.

Over the last few years, Putin's rubber-stamp parliament has passed a series of increasingly draconian anti-gay laws. The most recent of these outlaws "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations"—a term so deliberately vague and sweeping that Russian activists can be (and have been) arrested merely for holding up a sign in public reading "Gay is normal." It effectively silences any advocacy for LGBT rights or even any public acknowledgment of LGBT people's existence. An even more horrific bill now under consideration would take away children (both adopted and biological) from gay and lesbian parents.

With the Russian government sending clear signals that LGBT people are beneath moral consideration, it's no surprise that violent homophobes in Russian society are feeling increasingly disinhibited. We've seen the premeditated torture and murder of gay people, and gangs of skinheads assaulting gay-rights protestors in public, sometimes with the police looking on, sometimes with the police's active assistance.

In this climate of deepening fear and brutality, we're already starting to see an exodus of gay people from Russian society, like the journalist Masha Gessen, who's calling on Western nations to grant asylum: "The only way at this point that the U.S. can help Russian gays and lesbians is [to] get us the hell out of here." The historical parallel to the exodus of Jewish people from pre-World War II Nazi Germany seems impossible to ignore.

The fact that the 2014 Winter Olympics will be in Sochi, Russia, has focused international attention and outrage on Putin's crackdown. The playwright Harvey Fierstein, among others, has argued that we should boycott the Olympics in protest. With corporate sponsors getting nervous, the IOC initially tried to allay people's fears by assuring them that foreign visitors in Russia wouldn't be subject to the anti-gay laws. But that was quickly undercut by Russian government ministers insisting that the laws will apply to everyone, including athletes, journalists and spectators. In the face of this, the IOC announced that all protests and political statements by athletes would be forbidden at the Olympics, thus making it clear whose side it's on.

Whether the international community should boycott Sochi is a wrenching political question. A boycott would be a huge embarrassment for Russia, to be sure. But it's not at all clear it would actually weaken Putin's power the way divestment from apartheid South Africa did. If anything, the people who'd be most directly harmed by an Olympic boycott would be the athletes, who spend their whole lives training for this chance to prove themselves. Gay medalists like Greg Louganis have argued that rather than boycott, athletes should use the global stage of the Olympics as a platform to protest Russian bigotry, IOC be damned. On the other hand, given the political climate in Russia and the anti-gay violence that occurs with impunity, it's not clear that LGBT people and allies would even be safe there.

But although these are difficult dilemmas with no easy answers, there's one group of people who aren't morally conflicted at all: American right-wing religious extremists. A long list of religious-right figures have lined up to praise Russia, loudly insisting that its brutal suppression and persecution of gay people is exactly what we need at home. Here are some of them:

Even though the religious right's power is slowly ebbing in America, they're working to export American-style culture wars all over the world. As the world ever so slowly becomes more peaceful and tolerant, they're engaged in a rearguard action, planting the seeds of theocracy wherever they can, urging developing countries to be more authoritarian, more repressive, more intolerant of differences. They've partially succeeded, to devastating effect, in countries like Uganda where domestic homophobia makes fertile soil for their brand of paranoia and unrelenting hatred. We're now seeing that same deadly symbiosis in Russia.