The Right Wing in Poland Demonizes The Gay Community With The Same Boogey Lies in The US in The 50-70's
The right-wing populist Law and Justice party in Poland won big in 2015 by scapegoating migrants. Now they’re doing it again — this time demonizing the country’s LGBTQ community.
“There’s a big political campaign going on, and we’ve been chosen as the scapegoat to focus on by the ruling party,” said Ola Kaczorek, co-president of Love Does Not Exclude, a group that campaigns for marriage equality.
The party’s rhetoric has stoked violence. Thousands of ultranationalists and Catholic hard-liners terrorized Bialystok’s first-ever Pride Parade, on July 20, shouting death threats and lobbing firecrackers, cobblestones, and bottles, some filled with urine, at the marchers.
“I’ve never experienced homophobic hatred on such a scale before,” Jakub Przybysz, a 26-year-old medical intern who has lived in the city in eastern Poland for seven years, told VICE News.
Advocacy groups, opposition politicians, and the country’s independent human rights commission said the violence is being encouraged by Law and Justice.
The ruling party’s agitation on LGBTQ issues appears to be a calculated play to drum up support from its conservative base. And the culture war, critics say, is distracting from the issues that voters actually care about, like access to health care and education.
This scapegoating tactic has worked for Law and Justice before. Back in 2015, the party branded itself as the last defender of Polish identity amid a wave of Middle Eastern immigration. It worked: They won the elections and secured an outright majority in the government. The party is poised to win big again.
For the first time since the protest movement in Hong Kong started in June, a cop fired a live round. As the protests continue to escalate with no signs of slowing, law enforcement is promising to “stamp out” the violence.
Plus:
Plus:
- Don’t panic, but Ruth Bader Ginsberg is being treated for cancer again
- What happens when you’re released from the most secure prison in the U.S.
- Black artists are making valuable work. Forgers are profiting off of it.
David, a 21-year-old college student in the United States, knows he’s attracted to children between the ages of 4 and 11. He’s one of many pedophiles who knows his desires are wrong. But he believes he was born this way — and that with treatment, his urges can be controlled.
But in the U.S., getting that sort of treatment comes with huge risk due to laws requiring therapists to report people they deem a risk to children to the police.
We went to Berlin to find out about “Project Dunkelfeld,” one of the only places in the world that offers treatment for pedophiles.
Comments