KRASNIK, Poland – When local councilors passed a resolution two years ago to declare their small town in southeastern Poland ‘free of LGBT’, the mayor did not see much harm in a symbolic and legally meaningless gesture.
Today he scrambles to limit the damage.
What initially seemed like a costly soup for conservatives in the rural and religiously pious Polish border areas along Ukraine, the May 2019 decision became an expensive embarrassment for the city of Krasnik. It has endangered millions of dollars in foreign funding, and according to Mayor Wojciech Wilk, “our city has become a synonym for homophobia,” which he says was inaccurate.
A French city broke off a partnership with Krasnik last year out of protest. And Norway, from which the mayor hoped to raise nearly $ 10 million from this year to fund development projects, said in September that he would not give any grants to any Polish city declaring itself “free of LGBT”.
“We have become the outbreak of Europe, and it is the citizens who have not had the most political politicians,” he said. Wilk laments that councilors are now pushing to repeal the resolution that puts the town’s 32,000 residents at the center of a heated debate. traditional and modern values. The situation also illustrates the real consequences of political stance in the trenches of Europe’s cultural wars.
When Krasnik declared himself ‘free from LGBT’, he joined dozens of other towns in the region that took similar measures with strong support from the ruling party of Poland, right and right, and the Roman Catholic Church.
The statements, which are part of the party’s efforts to rally its base ahead of a 2020 presidential election, do not prevent gay people from entering or threatening those already present. Instead, they promised to uphold ‘LGBT ideology’, a term used by conservatives to describe ideas and lifestyles that they saw as threatening to Polish tradition and Christian values.
Cezary Nieradko, a 22-year-old student who describes himself as Krasnik’s ‘only openly gay’, dismissed the term ‘LGBT ideology’ as a smokescreen for homophobia. He recalled how his local pharmacist, after the city adopted his resolution, refused to fill out his prescription for a heart medicine.
Mr. Nieradko recently moved to the nearby city of Lublin, where the regional council also adopts a ‘LGBT’ resolution, but whose residents are generally more open-minded.
Jan Albiniak, the Krasnik councilor who drafted the resolution, said he had nothing personal against gay people, which he described as ‘friends and colleagues’, and that he wanted to include ideas that would normalize the normal functioning of our society. can disturb. . ”
He said he drafted the resolution after watching an online video of abortion rights activists shouting at Christians in Argentina. Although it had nothing to do with LGBT issues or Poland, Mr. Albiniak said the video shows that ‘we are dealing with some kind of evil here and can see manifestations of demonic behavior’ around the world that ‘need to be stopped’.
In response to a result of anti-LGBT resolutions in the heartland of Poland, the European Union, of which Poland is a member, as well as Norway and Iceland, have said they will cut funding for any Polish city making the commitment. from Europe to violate tolerance and equality.
The European Parliament also adopted a resolution last month in which all 27 countries in the bloc are an LGBT freedom zone, although the Polish resolution, as the Polish resolutions declare the opposite, has no legal force.
However, all the attitude began to have concrete consequences.
The mayor of Krasnik said he was concerned that unless his city’s “LGBT status” was revoked, he had little chance of obtaining foreign funds to finance electric buses and youth programs, which he said was particularly important because young people keep leaving.
“My position is clear: I want this resolution to be repealed,” he said, “because it is detrimental to the city and its people.”
It will be an uphill battle.
Faced with the loss of foreign grants, several other Polish villages that have declared themselves “free of LGBT” or adopted a “family charter” that trumpets traditional values have changed their minds over the past few months. But the 21-member council in Krasnik, which voted against the repeal last year, recently rejected an appeal by the mayor for a different vote.
Only one member openly agreed to take sides. “I made a mistake,” said Pawel Kurek, who did not assist in the original vote but now says the resolution was foolish and should be revoked.
At the national level, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the chairman of law and justice, told the Gazeta Polska newspaper last week that Poland must resist LGBT ideas that ‘weaken the West’ and ‘against all common sense’.
Underlying the deadlock in Krasnik are the political and demographic realities in a region to which many young people have left to find work abroad or in Warsaw, the capital, and where the Catholic Church remains a powerful force.
While many older people like that their city is ‘free of LGBT’, young people who are left behind are terrified. Amanda Wojcicka, a 24-year-old worker in the convenience store, said the idea was an embarrassment.
But Jan Chamara, a 73-year-old former construction worker, said he would rather live on a diet of just potatoes than give outside economic pressure to repeal the resolution. “I do not want their money,” he said. Chamara said. He said he had never seen gay people in Krasnik but still needed precaution. “We will survive.”
Krasnik gained so much notoriety that a French minister responsible for European affairs said he wanted to visit the city recently to show his opposition to discrimination during an official visit to Poland. The official, Clément Beaune, who is gay, put off the visit to Krasnik after what he described as pressure from Polish officials not to go, an allegation that the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs was untrue.
When Krasnik and other towns adopted ‘free of LGBT’ resolutions in early 2019, few people paid attention to what is widely seen as a political stunt by a ruling party that offends the enemy’s ‘political correctness’.
But that changed early last year when Bartosz Staszewski, a LGBT activist from Warsaw, began visiting towns that promised to ban ‘LGBT ideology’. Mr. Staszewski, a documentary filmmaker, took with him an official appearance yellow card that read in four languages: “LGBT-FREE ZONE.” He put the fake sign next to the right sign of each city and took photos that he posted on social media.
The action, which he called ‘performance art’, provoked outrage in Europe as it put a spotlight on what Mr. Staszewski described in an interview in Warsaw as a pressure from conservatives to ‘transform basic human rights into an ideology’.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Mr. Staszewski is accused of generating a false scandal over ‘no-go zones’ that do not exist. Several towns, backed by a right-wing outfit partly funded by the government, have blamed the activist for banning ‘ideology’ as an obstacle to LGBT people.
But even those who support the measures often seem confused about what they want excluded.
Asked on television whether the region around Krasnik would become Poland’s first LGBT-free zone, Elzbieta Kruk, a prominent politician for law and justice, said: “I think Poland will be the first LGBT-free area.” She later turned her down and said the target was ‘LGBT ideology’.
For mr. Wilk, the mayor of Krasnik, the semantic bickering is a sign that it’s time to abandon attempts to free the city from someone or something.
But Mr. Albiniak, the initiator of the resolution, promised to resist what he threatened to withhold money as extraterrestrial blackmail.
“If I vote to revoke,” he said, “I vote against myself.”
Anatol Magdziarz reported.