Last week, the Hungarian parliament banned any portrayal of homosexuality or transgenderism to minors, in educational material or on television. Appending this to a law protecting children from child abuse, the country’s president, Viktor Orbán, drew an explicit connection between homosexuality and paedophilia. In so doing, he resorted to a canard that much of the world has long dispensed with, but that is enjoying a troubling new emergence in the global battles against “gender ideology”: the danger posed by homosexuals and trans people to children.
“The logic of the government is to find an enemy and pretend that they are saving the country from this enemy,” said the Hungarian LGBTQ+ leader Tamás Dombos in a presentation to the United States Congress last week. Dombos described the new law as “a conscious and diabolic political strategy” by the government to divert public attention from its messy response to the Covid crisis. The law is also a salvo in a tough upcoming election, and an effective way of staking what I term a “pink line”: a nativist boundary protecting, in this case, Hungarian “values” against the immoral imperialism of George Soros and Brussels. » | Mark Gevisser | Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Stonewall risks all it has fought for in accusing those who disagree with it of hate speech »
