LGBT “ideology weakens the west and terrorises people”, warns Polish leader Kaczyński

Poland must be protected from “LGBT ideology”, which is “weakening the west” and “terrorising people”, says the country’s most powerful politician. Jarosław Kaczyński also revealed that his government is preparing the latest in a series of judicial reforms that have brought Warsaw into conflict with the EU.

Kaczyński – who holds the title of deputy prime minister but, as chairman of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, is Poland’s de facto leader – was speaking with the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Polska in an interview broadcast on the conservative newspaper’s recently launched social media platform.

Asked about “LGBT and gender ideology”, Kaczyński warned that they have “begun to dominate the world today and are contrary to common sense and radically limit the freedom of a great number of people who are terrorised to accept this ideology”.

Poland’s government has, for the last two years, waged a campaign against what it calls “LGBT ideology”, referring to an allegedly dangerous set of ideas regarding sexual and gender identity that are being imposed on Poland from abroad and which threaten traditional values and culture.

“Christian civilisation…is under attack today, but it can be defended, not only in Poland, but in a much wider dimension,” continued the PiS chairman. “As long as we are in power, nobody will impose anything on us – those who want to live in a normal world, where a woman is a woman and a man is a man”.

“All this madness…weakens the west”, he warned, and “is taking place in a world where there exist strong states that exploit weakening civilisations”.

“There are various political and cultural groups” that want to “mechanically eradicate that which those generations who remember communism value highly”, said Kaczyński.

These groups create “invented problems…with the help of propaganda”, he said, citing claims that in the United States 20% of young men have doubts about their gender identity. “This is the result of them being duped, not a natural situation,” he said.

The PiS leader also hit back at recent criticism of Poland’s anti-LGBT rhetoric by EU institutions. “Nowhere in the European treaties is there anything that induces or forces us to accept these rules,” he declared. “We will defend ourselves fiercely and firmly.”

Kaczyński likened the current threat to a previous moment in Poland’s turbulent history when “others tried to impose [things] on us that we do not want to agree to”. But he noted that, “in the end, sometimes after a very tough and long fight, we won”.

Referring to another area of conflict with the EU, Kaczyński noted that further reform of the judiciary is already “very well prepared” and will be unveiled in due course.

This week, the European Commission filed the latest in a series of cases against Poland at the Court of Justice of the European Union, accusing it of violating judicial independence.

“We are a sovereign state and we have the sacred right to reform the judiciary, which actually works disastrously at the moment [and] is very harmful to the Polish state, and thus to Polish society, the nation,” Kaczyński told Gazeta Polska.

On Monday, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki filed a request to Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal – whose chief justice is a close associate of Kaczyński – asking it to confirm the supremacy of Polish over European law.

Kaczyński has been at the forefront of PiS’s campaign against “LGBT ideology”, which he has described as an “imported movement” that “threatens our identity, our nation, its continued existence, and therefore the Polish state”.

Last year, the PiS chairman warned that, if Poland does not fight to protect its values, it could follow in the footsteps of Ireland, which has become a “Catholic wilderness with rampant LGBT ideology”.

He and his party have also sought to portray his domestic political opponents as seeking to bring “LGBT ideology” into Poland. Last year, he warned that the main opposition presidential candidate would, if elected, “consent to…the LGBT offensive that is introducing…far-reaching moral corruption”.

Main image credit: Miłość Nie Wyklucza/Flickr (under CC BY-ND 2.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.