Poland – After the Lesser Poland (Małopolskie) voivodship on 22 September and the Holy Cross (Świętokrzyskie) voivodship on 24 September, the Subcarpathian (Podkarpackie) and Lublin voivodships followed suit on 27 September when their provincial assemblies repealed their 2019 resolutions by which they declared their local governments free of LBGT ideology.
Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, really?
This reversal is due to the Polish provinces being blackmailed by the European Commission, which threatened to suspend their EU subsidy payments until further notice. The European Commission considers that the resolutions which have just been repealed or modified, and which had no legal effect, violated EU rules against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. For this reason, the Commission had sent letters asking five Polish provinces to repeal their resolutions, although it was not clear on what legal ground it could withhold regional funds. Four provinces have now complied with the injunctions from Brussels.
The new resolution adopted on 27 September in Rzeszów by the Subcarpathian provincial assembly now mentions the province’s opposition to any type of “hatred and discrimination based on sex, age, race, disability, ethnic origin, religion, beliefs, or sexual orientation”.
The Marshal (speaker of the provincial assembly) of Lesser Poland, Witold Kozłowski, explained his own province’s turnaround as follows:
“Neither I nor any member of our provincial assembly, whether from the right or the left, was prepared to take the responsibility of leaving Lesser Poland without those EU funds.
[…] Many of the provisions of the 2019 declaration have raised controversy and ambiguity. It is in this regard that the European Commission has asked us to clarify these issues. Lesser Poland is a strong region, built on values and based on the centuries-old tradition of Christianity.”
The fifth voivodship concerned, Lodz (Łódź), has so far kept in place its 2019 Local Government Charter for the Rights of the Family, which admittedly reaffirms, just like the Polish Constitution, that marriage is solely the union of a man and a woman, but does not mention in any form LGBT ideology or even the acronym “LGBT” or one of its equivalents.
