No Andy. We don't want to boycott the Sochi Olympics.
Olympic boycotts may feel good, but they don't work. In fact, they're counterproductive.
I admit that it warms my cockles to see my neo-con colleague and others, not exactly champions of the downtrodden, suddenly evangelistic about an Olympic boycott in support of the LGBTQ community.
Such an ironic conservative conversion is an overdue and welcome capitulation to the inexorable march towards human rights for the LGBTQ community.
But it's also an illustration of why Olympic boycotts don't work.
These are political statements, not an encouragement for human rights. Their effect is to polarize political positions and fan the cold war; to entrench positions not change them.
What Olympic historians call "the boycott era" began in Montreal in 1976, when 28 nations boycotted the Games because New Zealand wasn't kicked out for playing rugby against South Africa. China boycotted because Taiwan was allowed to participate. New Zealand, Taiwan and China were ultimately unaffected - except for their athletes, who were denied their Olympic dream.
In short, the boycott didn't work.
The U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics neither shamed the then-USSR out of Afghanistan nor embarrassed its people - to Russians it was just more western petulance.
It didn't work.
And the Soviet boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Games was so ineffective; I can't even remember what it was about.
It definitely didn't work.
There hasn't been a significant boycott since Barcelona in 1992, and renewing the decade-dead "boycott era" isn't the best way to fight Russia's bigoted anti-gay laws.
The world should be at the Sochi Olympics; smartphones poised. If any Russian official so much as whispers an anti-gay epithet, the world will know by the end of the day.
One need only look to the Arab Spring to see the power of the presence of social media.
No Andy, taking our Olympic balls and going home won't hasten Russia's acceptance of their LGBTQ community, no matter how many neo-cons jump on the anti-Russian, I mean pro-gay, bandwagon.
In 1986, I showed Bill Vander Zalm's Socred government what was what by boycotting Expo '86.
That also didn't work, because like Olympic boycotts, it was a petulant and clumsy political strategy.
