Ronline, you're speaking from a very idealistic place. In your world, gays, gypsies, and Jews are all accepted as equals by Romanians.
I try to make it that way :)
But the reality is, many Romanians do not share these ideals with you.
*You* may not have a burning hatred for anything Russian, but it's clear many Romanians do.
That's not true. Not in the way you see it least. The dislike for Russian elements is due to historical context, not to any intrinsic burning hatred. You don't see Romanians burning Russian flags in the street like Arabs burn Israeli flags. In fact, in comparison to, say, Poland or the Baltic states, Romanians are quite neutral towards Russia (at least in my part of Romania, the attitude is more Russia-ignorant, people really don't care what's happening east of Romania anymore).
I think the main reason why so much outcry over this Wikipedia has been made is due to an ingrained fear to return to the past, even symbolically, in post-Communist Europe in general. Trying to promote the Cyrillic script for the Moldovan language was seen as going "back to the past" and it is only natural that this be opposed by people who have particularly bitter memories of the past (it would be like proposing to reintroduce Russian as the second state language in Estonia just because there's a significant Russian minority there).
Case in point -- if there were an English WP in Devanagari, no
Americans would go to the lengths Romanians have gone to to campaign for its closure. The attitude would be, "It's a bit ridiculous, but why should we care?"
Well that's exactly my point. The Devanagari case cannot be compared to the Romanian/Moldovan case because of historical context. If there would be a proposal to launch a Romanian Wikipedia in Devanagari, I don't think any Romanians would care either. Cyrillic, however, is politically-sensitive. Just try getting Estonian WP to accept a Cyrillic version and you'll see the result (my Estonian comparison again - Estonian was never written in Cyrillic, but Moldovan was forcibly converted, that's a double standard).
"Forced to learn the language using Cyrillic characters" is a phrase I
have seen used almost exclusively by Romanians. Moldovans just speak of a script change, of reversion to Latin script. These people had much more important things to worry about at the time than what script they wrote in. Even during perestroica, there were no protests to revert to Latin -- the MSSR gov't simply did that without any sort of popular outcry.
Well, even though there may not have been a public outcry, it was publicly imposed. It's not as if Moldovans voluntarily switched to Cyrillic. They were forced (i.e. involuntarily made) to accept a script that was foreign to the language they knew.
Actually, while I was troubled by this for a while, I found out that
Latin is the official script for Tatar in Tatarstan. This is in conflict with the fact that Cyrillic is, by a recent national law, the official script for all languages of the Russian Federation, however, the Tatar law still exists and Tatars themselves seem to be embracing Latin.
Yes, I knew that Tatar people preferred Latin, but not that the Tatar Government actually saw that script as official. In any case, the Wikipedia should be biscriptal.