AP: “Members of Poland’s LGBT community say they are angry and afraid after President Andrzej Duda won re-election in a divisive campaign that cast their movement for equal rights as a dangerous ‘ideology’ that threatens families in the deeply Roman Catholic country.”
“Some activists say the homophobic rhetoric that emerged echoes policies in Russia under President Vladimir Putin, who signed a law in 2013 banning gay ‘propaganda’ and where the constitution now bans same-sex marriage.”
Anne Appelbaum: “Rare is the election campaign that truly hinges on a single issue. But in the run-up to Sunday’s presidential election in Poland, ‘LGBT’—an English acronym that sounds strange and foreign in Polish—was unquestionably the dominant theme. The coronavirus pandemic is still ravaging the world, an economic crisis looms, and international politics are in turmoil. Yet when the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, declared that ‘LGBT are not people; they are an ideology’—and for that matter an ideology ‘even more destructive’ than communism—the statement instantly became the most widely discussed moment of the campaign.”