United States Ambassador in Poland Georgette Mosbacher said he was "concerned and disappointed" in the conservative government's support of a magazine planning to distribute "LGBT-free zone" stickers and continued attacks on LGBT rights on Friday, according to Bloomberg.
LGBT rights in Poland has become an increasingly tense issue before this year's general elections after ruling Law & Justice Party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said gay rights presented a "grave danger" for Poland's families.
More than two dozen cities in Poland have adopted declarations claiming they are "free from LGBT ideology” and opposing “social engineering that’s foreign to Polish culture and natural order.”
The pro-Law & Justice Party Gazeta Polska weekly is also planning to distribute stickers containing the declaration to its readers.
“I’m concerned and disappointed that some groups use stickers to promote hatred and intolerance,” U.S. Ambassador in Poland Mosbacher said in a Twitter post on Friday.
Michal Bilewicz, a researcher at the University of Warsaw who tracks the prevalence of prejudices against minorities in public discourse, told The Washington Post the party has shifted from blaming migrants for Poland's problems to Western "LGBT ideology."
Bilewicz said the Law & Justice Party came to power as a right-wing force using anti-migration rhetoric, aligning itself with Hungary's strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Kaczynski shifted the party's focus after Warsaw's mayor took steps to include sex education and LGBT issues into school curriculums to meet the World Health Organization's guidelines.
He claimed LGBT rights were an imported “threat to Polish identity, to our nation, to its existence and thus to the Polish state.”
A recent campaign ad for the Law & Justice party depicted an umbrella emblazoned with its party logo protecting a family from rainbow-colored rain.
Even though a number of party officials claim the declarations have no effect on regulations, human rights experts said the message is still anti-LGBT across the European Union country.
Warsaw Deputy Mayor Pawel Rabiej informed prosecutors about the plan to distribute the anti-LGBT stickers and said it was behavior similar to German Fascists during World War II, where the Nazis invaded Poland and killed millions of Jews, LGBT people, and more.
“This is very dangerous,” Rabiej said by phone to Bloomberg. “Before the Holocaust and the genocide of the Jews, in the 1930s, sexual minorities were persecuted, which not everyone remembers, and calling to create zones free of any group brings us directly back to those times.”
-WN.com, Maureen Foody
Photo:
AP / Alik Keplicz
