within days of his inauguration in 2000. At the Sydney Writer's Festival in 2012, Gessen expressed their view that the institution of marriage shouldn't exist. They said: "Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we're going to do with marriage when we get there. Because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change and it should change, and again, I don't think it should exist." They contributed several dozen commentaries on Russia to The New York Times blog "Latitude" between November 2011 and December 2013. Among their subjects were the banning of so-called "homosexual propaganda" and other related laws; the harassment and beating of journalists, and the depreciation in value of the ruble. In March 2013, politician Vitaly Milonov promoted the Russian law against foreign adoption of Russian children by saying: "The Americans want to adopt Russian children and bring them up in perverted families like Masha Gessen's." Dismissal from Vokrug sveta Gessen was dismissed from their position as the chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, Vokrug sveta, a popular-science journal, in September 2012 after Gessen refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin because Gessen considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns. After Gessen tweeted about their firing, Putin phoned them and claimed he was serious about his "nature conservation efforts." At his invitation, Gessen met him and Gessen's former publisher at the Kremlin, and were offered their job back. Gessen rejected the offer. Radio Liberty In September 2012, Gessen was appointed as director of the Russian Service for Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded broadcaster based in Prague. Shortly after their appointment was announced and a few days after Gessen met with Putin, more than 40 members of Radio Liberty's staff were fired. The station also lost its Russian broadcasting license several weeks after Gessen took over. The degree of Gessen's involvement in both of these events is unclear, but has caused controversy. Return to the US In December 2013, they moved to New York because Russian authorities had begun to talk about taking children away from gay parents. In March of that year, "the St Petersburg legislator [Milonov] who had become a spokesman for the law [against 'homosexual propaganda' towards children] started mentioning me and my 'perverted family' in