Three people, LGBT activists according to Polish media, have been charged with covering a statue of Jesus and other landmarks in Warsaw with rainbow flags last week, Polish police said on Wednesday (August 5th).
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" The Warsaw police have indicted two people for the desecration of monuments in Warsaw, " spokesman Sylwester Marczak said, quoted by the PAP agency. A third was, but the charge retained was not specified. " We are pursuing legal proceedings not because someone has hung a flag, but because in doing so they have offended religious feelings and desecrated the monument of Christ in particular, " he added.
The statues of Copernicus and the Warsaw mermaid, a symbol of the Polish capital, were among the other monuments covered with LGBT flags and bandanas bearing an anarchist symbol. To explain their act, activists published a manifesto online, notably on the Facebook page “ Stop Bzdurom ” (Stop idiocy ). “ It's an assault! A rainbow. It's an attack! We have decided to act. As long as I'm afraid to hold your hand. As long as there are still vans with homophobic signs on the street, ”they wrote in this text.
Only 29% of Poles support gay marriage
Only 29% of Poles support gay marriage, according to a 2019 opinion poll by the CBOS institute. During the election campaign ahead of the July presidential poll, the ruling conservatives in Poland, a deeply Catholic country, widely used anti-LGBT rhetoric, provoking protests from international institutions.
Conservative President Andrzej Duda, who was re-elected after the election, compared “ LGBT ideology ” to “ neo-Bolshevism ”. Several Polish regional communities have recently adopted resolutions declaring themselves “ zones without LGBT ideology ”. Last month, the European Commission rejected applications from the six of these cities for grants under a European twinning program, a first such measure.