Communism prevented Western social revolution reaching Poland, says government minister

Despite the misfortune it brought to Poland, communist rule helped prevent the social revolution that took place in the West, says a member of the country’s conservative government.

Education minister Przemysław Czarnek also spoke in favour of a proposed new law to prevent the “sexualisation of children”. He argued that it is the state’s duty to prevent “moral corruption” by sex educators even if parents want them to run classes in schools.

The remarks came during a congress titled “Church, Education, Upbringing” organised by the Europa Christi Movement under the honorary patronage of the education ministry.

Opening the event, Czarnek, referring to the words of former Polish Pope John Paul II, warned that “Europe must be Christian, and if it will not be Christian, it will not exist”.

He claimed that “we are seeing an attack on the family” from “neo-Marxists” but added that “we in Poland are holding back this neo-Marxist march much more strongly than people in the West”.

“It is a blessing within a misfortune that we had communism and there was [therefore] no time to deal with what the West was doing up to 1968,” added Czarnek in further remarks from the congress quoted by the Rzeczpospolita daily.

“We had no time for social and cultural revolutions, because we [only] had time to fight communism,” he continued. “Paradoxically, the period of communism prevented the entry of all those paradoxical civilizational phenomena that have been present in the West for years.”

The minister linked this to the issue of how children are brought up, saying that “today in Poland we are in a much better situation than Western European countries. Today in Poland, the overwhelming majority of parents behave correctly”.

However, he warned that it is necessary to take steps to prevent negative influences from the West – especially certain forms of sex education – from reaching Polish children, reports Rzeczpospolita.

“Even if parents consciously agree to sex education classes conducted [in schools] by an NGO that are an absolute promotion of perversions and deviancies, the constitution still says that everyone has the right to demand that the state protect children from moral corruption,” said Czarnek.

One way to ensure this, he said, is through a newly proposed law to prevent the “sexualisation of children” in preschools and schools by placing tougher restrictions on the entry of outside groups.

The bill has formally been put forward as a so-called citizen’s legislative initiative, meaning one proposed outside parliament and which must be supported by 100,000 public signatures to be considered. But it was last week backed by Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Last year, the PiS majority in parliament passed two similar laws, which Czarnek said were necessary to prevent the “moral corruption” of children. But both were vetoed by President Andrzej Duda.

Earlier this week, Czarnek told the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that he does not want to ban sex education as a whole from Polish schools. He only wants to stop “sexualisation”, which he defined as efforts to “promote sex, moral corruption and depravity” rather than teaching about sex as a “beautiful, intimate sphere of human life”.

Main image credit: MEiN (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

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.