The United States ambassador to Poland waved an outsized U.S. flag high above his head as he marched in the annual pride parade Saturday that wound its way through Warsaw’s streets.
“America embraces equality,” Ambassador Mark Brzezinski cried as he joined more than 30 other members of the U.S. Embassy to march through the capital’s streets, AP reports.
Western governments have expressed alarm in recent years as the conservative government in Warsaw has refused to embrace broader depictions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people as victims in need of state approval.
As Breitbart London reported, Poland instead sees the minority LGBTQI movement as a “foreign ideology” and a threat to its children and their future.
Poland: LGBT Ideology ‘a Threat to our Nation, Identity, and Existence’ https://t.co/Aa7kdk6hiP
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 26, 2019
The parade has regularly been criticized by Poland’s elected leaders as a threat to nation’s traditional Catholic identity.
Brzezinski told the Associated Press his embassy “has heard disturbing reports of an organized campaign targeting Poland’s LGBTQI+ community with hate, lies, and slander in an attempt to divide Polish society. These attempts to sow divisions only strengthen the hand of those who seek to weaken democracy.”
He provided no evidence in support of the allegations, before continuing: “We hope these reports are not true. We hope disagreement does not devolve into discrimination or worse,” Brzezinski said. “Words matter. Hate masquerading as morality can play no productive role in our societies.”
As Polish President Andrzej Duda campaigned for reelection in 2020, he promised to ban the propagation of LGBT ideology in public institutions and the promotion of homosexuality in schools.
Polish President Vows to Protect Children from ‘LGBT Ideology’, Support Traditional Families https://t.co/NAYYpyofZ1
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) June 11, 2020
“It is a foreign ideology. There is no consent for this phenomenon to happen in our country in any way.” Duda said, stressing “parents are responsible for the sexual education of their children”.
Last summer, the ruling party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said “we must protect ourselves from madness”while specifically pointing at the country’s small LGBTQI+ community.
And this spring, Poland’s commissioner for children’s rights ordered an inspection of schools that were ranked as the most LGBTQI+-friendly in the country, saying he wanted to make sure principals were checking their employees against a pedophile registry, the AP reports set out.
