Up until last week, it wasn't mentioned or suggested at all that the tightening and accompanying legislation would one way or another contain any LGBTQI features.Continue reading
Hungary is committed to child protection and will resist the push by Brussels to get the country to allow LGBTQ activists into Hungarian kindergartens and schools, the prime minister’s chief of staff told a regular press briefing on Wednesday.
Commenting on Wednesday’s European Parliament plenary debate on Hungary’s new child protection law, Gergely Gulyás said Hungary remained committed to European Union law, the Hungarian constitution and child protection.
The government is open to an objective debate in the matter but rejects the EP’s decision to put a politician “who has been sentenced in a binding ruling for gay revenge porn offences” in charge of the case, he said, referring to reports that Maltese MEP Cyrus Engerer, who has been tasked with drafting a resolution on the law, was found guilty in 2014 of circulating pornographic recordings of his former partner online without his consent.
Putting the MEP in question in charge of the resolution on the law “highlights the civilisational gap between the EP’s left-wing majority and the Hungarian government”, Gulyás said.
He called child protection “the most important cause”, adding that besides the Hungarian constitution, the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights also declares that raising children is the duty of the parents.
“Brussels can’t tell people how they should raise their children,” Gulyás said.
The Hungarian government’s arguments concerning the law are “obvious and clear” and in line with EU law and the Hungarian constitution, “but they’re not in line with the appalling, baseless and deceitful attacks” launched by the EP, Gulyás said.
“Hate speech is forbidden even against Hungary, and it’s all the more damaging that certain Hungarian MEPs are engaging in it too,” he said. Having certain “European bureaucrats” use EU law for “everyday political battles” is also harmful to the future of the bloc, he added.
Gulyás said a government decree on child protection issued on Tuesday had already reflected on Wednesday’s EP debate.
Regarding the statements of Vera Jourova, the European Commission’s vice-president in charge of transparency and values, who had said the Hungarian law discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation and went against the EU’s fundamental values, Gulyás said the Hungarian government considered the commissioner “persona non grata”, and “not the person the issue should be discussed with”.
Gulyás noted that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán had not taken part in the EP debate because “this was an inconsequential debate was about a law where the EP resolution has no weight whatsoever. The [Hungarian] government meeting was more meaningful and more important.”
“Orbán was the politician to do most against homophobia in Europe when he closed Hungary’s southern border against migrants,” he said.
Hungary rejects the whole debate which is trying to address the law as one harming basic human rights rather than as a child protection measure, Gulyás said.
“We are not advising anyone above 18 on how to live their lives. The Hungarian Constitution ensures human dignity to everyone … regardless of how they live. Child protection is a wholly unconnected issue, where the Constitution imposes a duty on the state to protect its institutions, and clearly states that raising their children is primarily a right of the parents,” he said.
While children’s sex education is the duty of the parents, teenagers will not be hindered in exercising their right to free speech and ask questions about homosexuality of their teachers, he said.
Gulyás insisted “there was no need” for transgender people to talk in kindergartens and schools about changing their gender.
Featured photo by Tibor Illyés/MTI
