The Polish president's criticism of homosexuals on his visit to Dublin this week is an issue which sharply divides Poles. Derek Scallyreports.
Poland's president Lech Kaczynski loves pushing liberal buttons. To this end, he has two party pieces: his love of the death penalty and his loathing of homosexuality. This week in Dublin he decided to push the homosexuality button, telling a shocked audience that if homosexuality were to be promoted "on a grand scale", mankind would die out.
The president's provocation is tried and tested. A year ago, he made the same remark, word for word, at Humboldt University in Berlin. But German gay rights activists were ready for him. They jeered and heckled him and one protester grabbed the microphone to attack his anti-gay views, delaying the start of his speech by half an hour.
Yet Kaczynski's remarks reflect the views of a large majority of the Polish population. A recent survey suggested that 88 per cent of Poles view homosexuality as abnormal and half of society would favour a ban on homosexual intercourse.
In a Eurobarometer survey last year, 59 per cent of Poles agreed that widespread discrimination exists against homosexuals in Poland while 41 per cent of those polled said they believed discrimination had increased in the last five years.
Poland's homophobes are a loud, visible bunch with a long list of anti-gay slurs to choose from. Words like pervert, fag, abnormal, deviant can be heard everywhere in the Polish media, in particular on Radio Maryja, the fundamentalist Catholic, government-friendly radio station which warns its listeners about "homosexual terror", "sodomitical unions" and "totalitarianism of sin".
In its view the EU is a gay conspiracy, which must qualify as a new category of euroscepticism.
Next week, Poland's Campaign against Homophobia will present a study showing another rise in anti-gay behaviour in Poland. The study is filled with shocking personal testimony, stories of beatings, humiliation, rape and harassment.
"In June last year, at 4pm in Saxony Park in Warsaw, I was on a walk with a gay friend. I heard something fall behind me so I instinctively turned around and saw a rock rolling," wrote one young man. "I heard some yelling and saw a group of several young men. We decided not to let them scare us and kept on walking. They caught up with us and had us surrounded, pushing us around, spitting in our faces, calling us faggots. It was in the park, on the sidewalk with people walking by us."
Last year, when The Irish Times ran an article on gay Poles who compared their situation to Nazi Germany, the Polish ambassador wrote a letter of complaint to the editor. He was unhappy about the comparison with the Third Reich but less so about homophobia in Poland. Instead, he reiterated the standard response questioning the "usefulness of manifesting any sexual orientation publicly, as it is a private domain".
If, for instance, Poland's bachelor Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski were a closeted homosexual, as many Poles believe, then it is a private matter. But when the Kaczynski twins, prime minister and president, remain silent as members of their government make hate-filled remarks about homosexuals, slurs that encourage bigots and drive young people to suicide, then it is a public matter.
"Before, if someone slapped a homosexual in the street they would fear reprisals," says Krystian Legierski, whose alternative bar and gallery, Le Madame, was closed by Warsaw authorities last year. "Now there's no problem, they practically have politicians' blessing."
President Kaczynski says he is not homophobic and that he is not interested in persecuting homosexuals. But, he says, equal rights for homosexuals are out of the question.
Yet Poland is signatory to at least three treaties, including the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which prohibit direct or indirect discrimination on specific grounds, including sexual orientation. Does Poland stand by these treaties? Has any other European government dared ask? Irish politicians are perhaps in a good position to ask. After all, it's only 15 years since the then newly-elected taoiseach Albert Reynolds said that decriminalising homosexual acts was at the "bottom of the agenda". A year later, in 1993, Ireland finally acted, but only in response to European pressure.
It is exactly this lack of European pressure that is compounding official homophobia in Poland, according to Polish gay rights campaigners. "Other countries are keeping silent because they do not want Poland to veto other things like economic matters which are viewed as much more important in the EU than human rights," says Robert Biedron of the Campaign against Homophobia in Poland.
Not only do the Kaczynski twins have homophobes in the ranks of their own Law and Justice (PiS) party, they are in coalition with the ultra-Catholic League of Polish Families (LPR). One of its politicians, Wojciech Wierzejski, has called for an investigation into links between homosexuality, paedophilia and organised crime and suggested last year that, if gay campaigners marched through Warsaw without a permit, police should beat them with their batons.
During that march, members of the LPR youth wing threw stones and bottles at marchers, shouting: "Euthanasia for gays, concentration camps for lesbians".
The EU suspended diplomatic relations with Austria when the extreme right Freedom Party was welcomed into office, yet no measures have been even considered against Poland.
"What do we need for action against Poland? A murder?" asks Biedron.
He doubts that President Kaczynski believes his own "end of mankind" remark, but uses the provocation as a smokescreen, behind which is a rallying call to like-minded bigots across Europe.
"These people are everywhere in Europe but hidden behind political correctness. Sooner or later they will emerge with their anti-gay, anti-Semitic rants," he says. By that time, he adds, Kacyznski hopes to have divided Europe into traditionalists like himself and what Polish conservatives call the "civilisation of death", known elsewhere as the liberal, tolerant Europe.
"Under this government it has become fashionable to be homophobic," says Biedron. "The words tolerant and liberal have become pejorative terms. Our government has its own idea about zero tolerance: tolerance is not tolerated."