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I have a Polish gay friend who is a second-class citizen. This kind of a statement if said between 2015 and 2023, west of the Oder-Neisse line (Polands Western frontier), would have been understood as little more than an anodyne boutade. But deployed around the countrys last legislative race, in October 2023, to score outrage points against the social conservatism of the defeated Law and Justice (PiS) government, it attains all the persuasive power of a five-year-olds temper tantrum. If indeed homosexuality is a category against which PiS has discriminated in its eight years in office, then that second-class citizenship should correlate with the entire demographic being targeted. If true, this would turn any individual testimony, on either side, into a statistical irrelevanceone that hinders, not aids, the rhetorical frame into which that statistic is slotted.

The statement shifts focus away from the legal rudiments of the discrimination being alleged (an omission which insinuates it may not be as blatantly evident as suggested) and redirects it towards one loneand potentially impartialwitness, whose anonymity need not be mendacious, but suggests at least some degree of self-perception. This is supported by a cursory survey of Polands long-brewing culture wars over sexual mores, which long predate Law and Justices (PiS) legislative victory over the liberal-centrist Civic Platform (PO) in 2015, and which are unlikely to be decisively won by either side. This glance reveals, unsurprisingly, that a substantial segment of the Polish LGTB community is at odds with the countrys conservative majority in a tug-of-war whose battlelines dont always track with partisan cleavages.

A non-trivial segment of Polands LGBT votersto the extent a sexual orientation can be assimilated to an electoral blocfind a home within PiS, and even further to the Right. And some in the anti-PiS opposition are less amenable to the maximalist, sexually libertarian views prevalent in the West under the same LGBT rubric. Whereas the right to legal succor against homophobic hate crimes, same-sex unions, and adoption by gay couples features more prominently in the Polish agenda than in the Western European countries that have already turned these rights into law, one feature is common with the West. Other rights are being lumped into Polands ideological struggle, too, including the right to align school curricula with understandings of sexual education deemed outlandish by a majority of the electorate, the right to fly LGBT flags on public premises, the right to transgender bathrooms, and more.

There are several striking features about the quote which opens this article. It was made to a group of young professionals taking a Saturday morning class at a Catholic university in Madridan odd setting in which to import woke and socially unscientific tropes. The luncheon speaker was a young former entrepreneur, now a right-of-center member of the European Parliament (MEP), who proudly holds onto her pro-life legislative record even as her party gradually embraces abortion. This lawmakers parliamentary allies, Civic Platform (PO), are purporting to restore liberal democracy in Poland, which they allege had been suspended under PiS. It is worth noting that POs restoration of democracy is being carried out through the purging of civil servants deemed disloyal, the takeover of public media, and the storming of the presidential palace to detain and imprison two legally pardoned politicians.

Our guest MEP was naturally loath to find fault with her Polish allies so close to the June 2024 EU election cycle, even off-the-record. In the background, Spains socialist PM is staging his own coup against the rule of law through an unconstitutional amnesty for seditious Catalan politicians. In nominally opposing Snchezs coup, but not Civic Platforms, she thereby normalized the very double standard that her voters have sent her to Brussels to oppose. But whats more salient is that a self-hyped elitist of her sorta cognitive meritocrat who attended top schools and worked for the World Bankwould attempt to persuade a group of young Catholics that gays in Poland are persecuted because someone told her soand to hell with the facts. In choosing not to disclose this persons identity, I am not doing her party any favors, for her colleagues would all likely reason along the same dumbed-down lines.

It is possible to intuit that the inferior rights this speaker alleged are in part self-perceivedfueled by cultural battles unrelated to the legal possibilities of living a fully homosexual life. The conflation of LGBT rights with the right to legislate a whole-of-society agenda that is not even majoritarian among homosexuals is becoming the political norm in both Western and Central Europe. At an earlier session of the aforementioned forum, a prominent national leader of the same party, who had also been governor of a large Spanish region, took aim at the right-populist VOX party, which, in the lead-up to our July 23 general election, saw one alderman in a small village throw the rainbow flag off a balcony. This leader claimed the party had, then and there, revealed its homophobia. Naturally, she had nothing to say about the policy, decreed by that villages previous left-wing local government, to place the flag on par with Spains and the EUs.

It is not hard to see why. For this second oratoras likely for the firstthe rainbow flag snugly fills the representational space of sexual orientation, even if no other sexual orientation has waved a flag in the past, and even if breaking this millenarian pattern may open a Pandoras box of cultural conflict. She omitted that flags arent usually flown to symbolize feelings towards other human beings but instead to command loyalty and arouse political action. Theyre waved on behalf of nations, causes, lobbiesnot on behalf of pet lovers or poetry readers. She ignored arguments that, whereas the rainbow flag may appeal to the identitarian impulses of a substantial section of the homosexual community, it doesnt represent these individuals as homosexuals, but as members of a cause, a political lobby working to advance an agendaworthwhile though it may sometimes be.

By conflating homosexuality with the willpower to mold society, these two self-proclaimed liberal stalwarts blind themselves to the many tyrannical ways in which the LGBT lobby is already remodeling society. It not only crassly instrumentalizes the sexual orientation of millions of well-meaning citizens, but also risks turning their fabled homophobic stigmas into reality. If they do desire to pit society against itself over the many ways of feeling sexually attracted, they should keep treading their current path: depriving parents of the ability to teach their children sexual morality, aligning language with political correctness, and reputationally persecuting wrongthinkall while claiming its done in the name of homosexual freedoms. But even then, their disastrous endgame will be in vain, for the sleaziest campaigns of social engineering cannot bend the true meaning of freedom.

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When a Culture War Becomes a Truth War The European Conservative - The European Conservative