“I’m afraid that the vast majority of [Law and Justice politicians] are just utterly cynical and they’re willing for the sake of retaining power and support to risk other people’s safety, well being, and dignity by using language like this,” says Marek Szolc, the only openly gay member of Warsaw’s city council. “This strategy apparently is working quite well in Poland and Hungary, and in Russia and in other states.”
Some have pointed to the similarities between the rhetoric used by the Law and Justice party and that used in Russia’s “anti-LGBT propaganda” legislation as reasons for their distress. [...]
While the most recent round of political attacks against them has been exceptionally vitriolic, Poland’s LGBT community has always faced discrimination. In terms of enumerated rights and protections for Queer people, Poland ranks last — tied with Latvia — among the 28 EU member states. Poland does not recognize same-sex marriage, grant civil partnerships, or have LGBT hate-crime legislation; a 1997 amendment to the constitution defines marriage as between a man and woman (though there is some legal dispute over its exact wording) and while cohabitating same-sex couples do have limited shared legal rights, adoption of children by a non-biological same-sex parent is not allowed. [...]
Due to a lack of hate-crime statistics, it is hard to know how much PiS’s language has contributed to violence against LGBT people, but it inarguably has. In the PiS stronghold of Białystok in eastern Poland, thousands of people protested against the city’s first-ever pride march. Outnumbering marchers four to one, counterprotesters threw rocks and bottles while some residents were reported to have dropped bags of flour from their apartments as the march wound its way through the city.
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