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It is amusing, to say the least, to watch red-faced Republican demagogues denounce President Barack Obama as a Kenyan Communist demagogue while they cheer for a true Communist demagogue, Russian President Vladimir Putin. They have no problem with Putin ruling his country with an iron hand, brooking no opposition, but let President Obama issue a perfectly legal executive order, and they go batshit crazy.

Of course, Old Vladimir hates gays, and that seems to go a long way toward warming the cockles of a conservative’s heart. Suddenly, free speech and all the rights that go along with it, are unimportant to conservatives. They claim to champion a monolithic morality and regularly denounce moral relativism but in fact, they embrace the reality of a relativistic morality. If they were true champions of free speech, they would be denouncing Putin like they denounce Obama.

Putin, for what it’s worth, seems to agree with conservative characterizations of his heroic stature, speaking of “fruitless, so-called tolerance” and claiming his anti-gay laws are a bastion of global conservatism. In many ways, the Sochi Olympics seem as much about glorifying Putin as the 1936 Berlin Olympics were about glorifying Adolf Hitler, who also claimed to be defending his country from insidious foreign ideology. Hitler, like Putin, liked to throw gays in jail, and American conservatives in the 1930s loved themselves some Adolf Hitler.

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So Putin, like Hitler for a previous generation of conservatives, is a hero, and the Western media, which is critical of the Russian strongman, is guilty of stirring up anti-Russian “hysteria.” For anti-gay activists, Russia has somehow (and impossibly, of course) become the true champion of human rights in the world. As one commenter on BuzzFeed quipped, “Thank God these guys are around to defend people’s right to deny people their rights.”

Gary Bauer, writing for the Campaign for Working Families, is upset that A&T has condemned Russia’s stance on LGBT rights. Bauer makes it sound very un-American to stand up for human rights and feels that we are somehow all obligated to repeat the mistakes of yesterday, because, you know, maintenance of the status quo demands it:

AT&T felt compelled to condemn Russia’s law against homosexual propaganda. It also wanted to make sure that everyone knew about AT&T’s “long and proud history of support for the [lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender] community.” I’m sure the executives at AT&T feel good about themselves today. When it comes to promoting gay rights, they have found their voice. But when I worked in the Reagan White House, I don’t recall AT&T or other major corporations condemning the Soviet Union while Jews and political dissenters rotted in Siberian gulags. Sadly, while Ronald Reagan worked to rebuild pride in America and America’s standing in the world, many corporate elites were eager to trade and “coexist” with the Soviets. And today most big corporations don’t feel a need to condemn Christian persecution and human rights violations. Why does concern for homosexual rights trump all other issues? I smell a double standard.

He smells a double standard? As my grandmother would have said, he is smelling his own upper lip. But then, hypocrites are always the first to cry “hypocrisy!”

And Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, who, as Right Wing Watch puts it, is “furious that [a] gay couple is featured in ‘America the Beautiful’ [a] song authored by gay songwriter,” wants America to be more like Russia. LaBarbera says we need an “acceptable and good idea” like Russia’s anti-gay laws because they stop folks like Disney from “promoting homosexualism” and “lesbianism to kids who don’t even know what sex is yet.”

LaBarbera does not explain of course how depicting opposite-sex couples somehow fails to promote sex between opposite sex couples but depicting same-sex couples does promote sex between same-sex couples. It makes LaBarbera stomp his little feet to think about kids “processing that information of two moms.”

They’re always asking, ‘How does it harm you? How does gay parenting affect you?’ Here’s how we see it affecting us: Young children are being taught that homosexuality, homosexual relationships is just normal. It’s actually very selfish because the adult choices are basically forced on everybody. This situation we saw in Disney is writ large. If there’s a lesbian parenting, lesbians have a child at a school, the whole school—there’s pressure on the school then to teach, to not have any stigma be on that whole idea of homosexuality. Of course we don’t hate anybody, we don’t want any child harmed but these situations are forced upon the general public. … You know, the children are being forced by this so-called domesticated homosexuality, they pay the price. People say, ‘Why can’t you just teach them? Why do you have to have any stigma at all?’ Well, basically they are asking us to give up our beliefs.

Of course, nobody on the left is asking anybody to give up their beliefs. We are, however, asking that LaBarbera and Bauer and all these other bigots give up the idea that we have to give up OUR beliefs simply because our beliefs offend them. And that is what is really going on here.

It is hardly a surprise that LaBarbera and fellow bigots Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries, and the American Family Association’s Sandy Rios are heading to Russia to cheer for Putin. There is not a lot of patriotism to be found in the ranks of the Religious Right, but that’s because the Religious Right champions an imaginary America ruled by the Bible rather than the real America governed by the Constitution.

Vladimir Putin is living the wet dream people like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul fantasize about. To be blunt, it’s chubby-city on the Republican side of the aisle in the House of Representatives and Republican-chaired committee meetings have become circle jerks. That they can still manage to find places to sit in their condition says quite a lot about their collective manhood. I’m not sayin’. Just sayin’.

The kid gloves have come off and these Republicans who cheer for Putin while condemning Obama have shown themselves not only to be hypocrites but to be champions of totalitarian ideology. Just as they love big government when it’s their big government, and free speech when it’s their free speech, they have shown that they love totalitarianism when they’re the demagogues in charge, and the bully’s bully, Vladimir Putin, is their kind of guy.