Poland: Gays fear new Prime Minister
04/08/2006
By
Doug Ireland - Gay City News
As the Polish government has taken new anti-gay actions in recent weeks,
Poland's lesbians and gays are expecting the worst from the
country;s ultra-homophobic new prime minister, Jaroslav Kaczynski,
whose identical twin brother, the equally homophobic Lech, is the
country's president.
"This political situation in Poland is going to be especially worse for
gays," says Lukasz Palucki, a prominent gay activist who was one of the
organizers of Warsaw's Gay Pride March, of the new prime
minister's appointment last month. "The Terrible Twins are crazy.
They don't care about international opinion and are capable of
anything," Palucki told Gay City News.
Both Kaczynskis are noted for their long history of political gay-bashing.
When he was mayor of Warsaw, President Lech Kaczynski twice banned the
city's Gay Pride March.
The Kaczynski brothers' hard-right, nationalist Law and Justice
Party took power in elections last October, and brought into their
coalition government the notoriously homophobic League of Polish Families,
a Catholic extremist party whose leader, Roman Giertych, was appointed
minister of education by the Kaczynskis. In June, the European Parliament
passed a resolution condemning the new Polish regime's homophobia,
and specifically denounced the League, whose leaders "incite people to
hatred and violence" against gay people, said the resolution.
A June editorial in The New York Times, "Poland's Bigoted
Government," argued that the Kaczynskis' regime "seems intent on
violating the rights of minority groups, beginning with an attack on
gays."
In his inaugural address as prime minister two weeks ago, Jaroslav
Kaczynski went out of his way to deliver a homophobic attack on gay
marriage, saying, "We won't let ourselves say that black is white,"
adding that "We are going to protect this foundation [marriage] of social
life" and "defend the family from attacks guided from outside the
country," a reference to the European Union's guarantees of full
civil and human rights for gays and to the EuroParliament's
condemnation.
In the latest anti-gay actions by the Kaczynskis' government, in
mid-July the National Radio and Television Council, which supervises and
controls the electronic media, ordered a commercial television network to
cancel its planned broadcast of "Gay Army." This Danish-produced reality
show, which was a hit when broadcast in Scandinavia, followed a group of
gay men sent to a boot camp for training so that, at the end of the
program, they could win a fight with real soldiers. The network could have
been fined one million zlotys (roughly $350,000) if it had proceeded with
the broadcast contrary to the orders of the government-run council.
At the end of July, a Polish public television network, TV Opole, abruptly
cancelled its planned broadcast of the fifth year of an important music
festival because, said the network's director, Jacek Kruczkowski,
the festival organizers "had hidden the fact that the theme of this
edition of the festival was "tolerance" and, he added,
"Tolerance can be dangerous, because in its name gays want to distribute
in the schools brochures on the techniques of homosexual love." The threat
of gays invading the public schools is frequently utilized by the Polish
right especially by Education Minister Giertych even though no
brochures of this type have ever been proposed for distribution in the
schools.
Jaroslav Kaczynski, sworn in as prime minister in mid-July, is considered
the real strategist and dominant figure in his political partnership with
his (younger by five minutes) brother. Jaroslav was previously the
ham-fisted political boss of Poland's Parliament following the
brothers' electoral victory, and had earlier proposed a law banning
homosexuals from teaching, passage of which is expected to be a priority
now that he is prime minister.
Jaroslav, 56, is a bachelor who still lives with his mother in a house
filled with an extraordinarily large number of cats and The Times of
London reported after his most recent appointment that "the views of the
new prime minister and the President are so similar that they often finish
each others sentences. The only way to distinguish them is by a
small mole to the left of Lech Kaczynski's nose and the cat hairs on
Jaroslav Kaczynski's clothes."
Rumors have circulated for years that Jaroslav is a closeted homosexual.
"The rumors became public a few years ago, when Lech Walesa [the former
Polish president, to whom the Kaczynski brothers had served as political
counselors when Walesa was head of the Solidarity movement] said, in an
interview on the Polish public TV network TVP1, that the Kaczynskis had
come to his birthday party, and that "Lech came with his wife and
Jaroslav came with his husband" said Palucki. The interview in
which Walesa made this comment was reprinted in the country's most
prestigious daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, on October 29, 1999.
Earlier this year, the Polish press published excerpts from a confidential
report on Jaroslav that had been prepared by the secret police of the
country's former Communist regime, saying that Jaroslav had never
dated women and implying that he was a homosexual. Jaroslav was forced to
comment publicly on this report, and called it a "fabrication." But, said
Palucki, "Everybody in Poland knows these stories, and [Jaroslav's
sexuality] is an open secret in the media, even though the press
won't come right out and say clearly, "Jaroslav, you are a
homophobic gay closet case."
One of the first moves of Prime Minister Kaczynski's new government
will be passage of a law forbidding TV from running ads for condoms, the
use of which is opposed by the Catholic Church, which has its strongest
European beachhead in Poland. The proposed new law is being prepared by
two government officials with responsibilities for family
affairs Vice-Minister for Labor Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska and
presidential counselor Hanna Wujkowska. Both women claim that advertising
for condoms could have a "bad influence" on the development of
Poland's youth.
If the law is passed, as expected, the already-feeble effort to prevent
the rapidly rising number of new HIV infections in Poland will become even
more difficult. The Web site GayPoland.pl reported on July 19 that new
official figures show an alarming rise of 30 percent in the number of new
HIV infections in Poland, and said that the government's miniscule
AIDS prevention budget is only big enough "to print merely several
thousand handouts, admits the Polish Ministry of Health." The report noted
that both the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice Party and their governing
coalition partner the League of Polish Families "strongly believe that HIV
is an exclusive problem of the gay population and disregard it
completely to the detriment of all Poles, gay or straight."
August 03, 2006
Poland's lesbians and gays are expecting the worst from the
country;s ultra-homophobic new prime minister, Jaroslav Kaczynski,
whose identical twin brother, the equally homophobic Lech, is the
country's president.
"This political situation in Poland is going to be especially worse for
gays," says Lukasz Palucki, a prominent gay activist who was one of the
organizers of Warsaw's Gay Pride March, of the new prime
minister's appointment last month. "The Terrible Twins are crazy.
They don't care about international opinion and are capable of
anything," Palucki told Gay City News.
Both Kaczynskis are noted for their long history of political gay-bashing.
When he was mayor of Warsaw, President Lech Kaczynski twice banned the
city's Gay Pride March.
The Kaczynski brothers' hard-right, nationalist Law and Justice
Party took power in elections last October, and brought into their
coalition government the notoriously homophobic League of Polish Families,
a Catholic extremist party whose leader, Roman Giertych, was appointed
minister of education by the Kaczynskis. In June, the European Parliament
passed a resolution condemning the new Polish regime's homophobia,
and specifically denounced the League, whose leaders "incite people to
hatred and violence" against gay people, said the resolution.
A June editorial in The New York Times, "Poland's Bigoted
Government," argued that the Kaczynskis' regime "seems intent on
violating the rights of minority groups, beginning with an attack on
gays."
In his inaugural address as prime minister two weeks ago, Jaroslav
Kaczynski went out of his way to deliver a homophobic attack on gay
marriage, saying, "We won't let ourselves say that black is white,"
adding that "We are going to protect this foundation [marriage] of social
life" and "defend the family from attacks guided from outside the
country," a reference to the European Union's guarantees of full
civil and human rights for gays and to the EuroParliament's
condemnation.
In the latest anti-gay actions by the Kaczynskis' government, in
mid-July the National Radio and Television Council, which supervises and
controls the electronic media, ordered a commercial television network to
cancel its planned broadcast of "Gay Army." This Danish-produced reality
show, which was a hit when broadcast in Scandinavia, followed a group of
gay men sent to a boot camp for training so that, at the end of the
program, they could win a fight with real soldiers. The network could have
been fined one million zlotys (roughly $350,000) if it had proceeded with
the broadcast contrary to the orders of the government-run council.
At the end of July, a Polish public television network, TV Opole, abruptly
cancelled its planned broadcast of the fifth year of an important music
festival because, said the network's director, Jacek Kruczkowski,
the festival organizers "had hidden the fact that the theme of this
edition of the festival was "tolerance" and, he added,
"Tolerance can be dangerous, because in its name gays want to distribute
in the schools brochures on the techniques of homosexual love." The threat
of gays invading the public schools is frequently utilized by the Polish
right especially by Education Minister Giertych even though no
brochures of this type have ever been proposed for distribution in the
schools.
Jaroslav Kaczynski, sworn in as prime minister in mid-July, is considered
the real strategist and dominant figure in his political partnership with
his (younger by five minutes) brother. Jaroslav was previously the
ham-fisted political boss of Poland's Parliament following the
brothers' electoral victory, and had earlier proposed a law banning
homosexuals from teaching, passage of which is expected to be a priority
now that he is prime minister.
Jaroslav, 56, is a bachelor who still lives with his mother in a house
filled with an extraordinarily large number of cats and The Times of
London reported after his most recent appointment that "the views of the
new prime minister and the President are so similar that they often finish
each others sentences. The only way to distinguish them is by a
small mole to the left of Lech Kaczynski's nose and the cat hairs on
Jaroslav Kaczynski's clothes."
Rumors have circulated for years that Jaroslav is a closeted homosexual.
"The rumors became public a few years ago, when Lech Walesa [the former
Polish president, to whom the Kaczynski brothers had served as political
counselors when Walesa was head of the Solidarity movement] said, in an
interview on the Polish public TV network TVP1, that the Kaczynskis had
come to his birthday party, and that "Lech came with his wife and
Jaroslav came with his husband" said Palucki. The interview in
which Walesa made this comment was reprinted in the country's most
prestigious daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, on October 29, 1999.
Earlier this year, the Polish press published excerpts from a confidential
report on Jaroslav that had been prepared by the secret police of the
country's former Communist regime, saying that Jaroslav had never
dated women and implying that he was a homosexual. Jaroslav was forced to
comment publicly on this report, and called it a "fabrication." But, said
Palucki, "Everybody in Poland knows these stories, and [Jaroslav's
sexuality] is an open secret in the media, even though the press
won't come right out and say clearly, "Jaroslav, you are a
homophobic gay closet case."
One of the first moves of Prime Minister Kaczynski's new government
will be passage of a law forbidding TV from running ads for condoms, the
use of which is opposed by the Catholic Church, which has its strongest
European beachhead in Poland. The proposed new law is being prepared by
two government officials with responsibilities for family
affairs Vice-Minister for Labor Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska and
presidential counselor Hanna Wujkowska. Both women claim that advertising
for condoms could have a "bad influence" on the development of
Poland's youth.
If the law is passed, as expected, the already-feeble effort to prevent
the rapidly rising number of new HIV infections in Poland will become even
more difficult. The Web site GayPoland.pl reported on July 19 that new
official figures show an alarming rise of 30 percent in the number of new
HIV infections in Poland, and said that the government's miniscule
AIDS prevention budget is only big enough "to print merely several
thousand handouts, admits the Polish Ministry of Health." The report noted
that both the Kaczynskis' Law and Justice Party and their governing
coalition partner the League of Polish Families "strongly believe that HIV
is an exclusive problem of the gay population and disregard it
completely to the detriment of all Poles, gay or straight."
August 03, 2006
