Europe, not Sodom!
The Church put enormous pressure upon parliamentarians to oppose Romania's international obligations that required the repeal of the anti-gay legislation. Since that time, the main narrative alignments have been designed to justify denying LGBT people's rights. Their acceptance in society would be equivalent to the “end of normality and social peace: it dissolves the institution of marriage, corrupts adolescents and young people, destroys the 'traditional family' and attacks 'moral values'.
When Romania entered the European Union, political parties and organizations with an agenda against women's and LGBT rights were ringing the alarm. It was time to mobilize for the defense of the Romanian nation and its values! Gradually, starting from 2014-2015, the concept imported from Catholic environments known as "gender ideology"/"gender theory"/"anti-genderism" has been gradually assimilated, conveniently serving as an umbrella term, and a tool for mobilization and attack against equal rights. Challenging the concept of gender is done in the name of preserving "traditional masculinity and femininity", "defending freedom" threatened by a new type of totalitarianism in which the majority of the population risks enduring the "dictatorship of minorities". This type of disinformation is perpetrated as a part of a broad process of de-democratization initiated by Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban: justified as a defense of normality- the discourse studied and enthusiastically adopted by a significant number of Romanian politicians.
A Chronicle of the main interventions of the anti-gender movement in Romania
2014. The first edition of the anti-gender doctrinaire Gabriele Kuby ‘The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom’, in the presence of the author, is released in Romanian. In November 2016, Kuby participates in a series of public debates against gender ideology/gender mainstreaming in Cluj-Napoca, Oradea, Iași, Bacău, Constanța, Bucharest, with the support of the Catholic Church. She says: They want to reach your children! They will sexualize them, and sexualizing children will collapse civilization. Because the family will collapse first. (...) Because the destruction of society is taking place, and the European Union is the standard bearer in this regard.
2015. The Orthodox Archbishop of Timisoara and Metropolitan of Banat, Ioan Selejan, announces a civic initiative of those who love the "Christian family" aiming at amending Article 48 of the Constitution and denying access to family life for LGBT people: (...) to state in the Constitution that the Christian family is based on the family code of the Holy Scripture - (...) man and woman.
2016. In May, the citizens' initiative to revise the Constitution by reformulating Article 48, Paragraph 1, is submitted to Parliament: ‘The family is established on the freely consented marriage between a man and a woman, on their equality and on the right and duty of parents to ensure the upbringing, education and discipline of their children’, it states.
2016. Ninel Peia, PSD (Social Democratic Party) member of the Parliament, submitted a bill to protect the "Innocence of Childhood" regarding the prohibition of sex education curricula in pre-school, primary and secondary education without the written consent of parents or guardians: Under various pretexts (...) pornography, LGBT proselytism and incitement to various forms of deviant sexuality are secretly introduced in our children's schools.
2018. The TOGETHER civic platform, "composed of 500 NGOs and over 1000 intellectuals", successfully requested the Romanian Government to withdraw from the public debate the National Parental Education Strategy 2018-2025 initiated by the Ministry of National Education. It argued: From the first paragraph to the last, this programmatic document is a creation of progressive propaganda that is looking for the proper ground to make new social experiments, to educate a new generation in the spirit of the denial of any cultural heritage and the radical denial of Christianity. (...) As it follows from the content of the Strategy, the biggest enemy of Romania's progress is the natural family. (...) This means that the family can be a socio-cultural product made up of two or more partners of the same sex, or of the opposite sex, from the marriage between an adult and a child, or a man and an animal, a man and an object, etc., according to the socio-cultural preference of each one.
2018. An analysis of the RESPECT Platform for Rights and Freedoms by the sociologist Victor Ciobotaru shows that, in June, out of 323 negative references to the LGBTI community on the FB page of the Coalition for the Family, 49 out of 109 posts refer to the fluid concept of "gender ideology". This is increasingly invoked as an argument for the elimination of legal protection of family life for LGBT people through a national referendum aimed at amending the Romanian Constitution.
2019. Vasile Cristian Lungu, senator PMP (Partidul Mișcarea Populară), is the architect of the legislative initiative submitted to the Parliament in order to amend and supplement the National Education Law no. 1/2011 to prevent and combat "proselytism based on the criterion of sex" and on the basis of “the gender criterion". The ban on education for equality based on gender, sexual orientation and gender identity was adopted by the Parliament in 2020, and was to be applied in the entire educational space, punished with an administrative fine between 10,000 and 50,000 lei applied by the Romanian Police: (...)in recent years, a new gender ideology has emerged. According to it, biological sex should not label people as "female" or "male", but each person can choose from dozens of types of gender the one they prefer. With the emergence of gender ideology, the phenomenon of proselytism, based on both sex and gender criteria, became a real danger to education.
2019. A legislative initiative to amend and supplement Law 272/2004 on the protection and promotion of children's rights is replacing the phrase ”sex education” with "health education", "in order to prevent the contracting of sexually transmitted diseases and the pregnancy of minors", only with "the written consent of the parents or legal representatives of the children".
2021. A legislative initiative made by UDMR parliamentarians (Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania is submitted to Parliament for the amendment and completion of Law no. 272/2004 on the "protection and promotion of children's rights", intended to protect children against "diffusion by any means of contents regarding the deviation from the sex established at birth or the popularization of sex change or homosexuality" in the entire public space: The societies of the European Western countries are currently witnessing an onslaught of new ideologies, such as gender theory (...). Given the increased access to information through the Internet, social networks (...), we believe that children are the most vulnerable category to the influences of these new ideologies. The state, through its authorities and institutions, has an increased responsibility in reducing this vulnerability (...).
2023. Two parliamentarians of the radical party A.U.R. (Alliance for the Unity of Romanians) proposed, under the title "Childhood without pornography", the amendment of a law aimed at preventing and combating pornography, by denying the right to inform students about sexual orientation and gender identity.
What can we do?
2017-2018
The RESPECT Platform for Fundamental Rights and Freedoms is formed, bringing together over 100 organizations and groups from the whole country. The adoption of an inclusive counter-narrative such as "families are diverse and all of them must be legally protected" and articulating a common Boycott Strategy of the constitutional referendum for the redefinition of the family led to its cancellation, the quorum of 30% not being reached in the vote.
2020
The law that prohibited gender studies in the entire education space was rejected by the Constitutional Court, which received numerous Amicus Curiae positions from human rights organizations, youth and student organizations, and Romanian universities supported by positions of teachers from all over the world (over 800 signatures) who invoked the right to free expression, freedom of thought, academic autonomy, guaranteed by various treaties and international conventions of which Romania is a party.
2023
Following a collective case of strategic litigation coordinated by the ACCEPT association, the largest on the topic of access to family life in the history of the ECHR, Romania is condemned and obliged to amend the national legislation to legally protect same-sex families. During 2023-2024, ACCEPT and MozaiQ associations are carrying out awareness and public pressure campaigns in social media and TV on the topic of social recognition and legal protection of these families.
The parliamentary and presidential elections at the end of 2024 will not be exempt from illiberal attacks focused on the danger of "gender ideology". We will monitor and file complaints in courts against politicians using hate speech to increase social polarization in society. We will multiply and expand solidarity networks with vulnerable groups to prevent further deterioration of the human rights situation. Will you join and support us?
Author: Florin Buhuceanu
Background illustration: unsplash / CC0 Creative Commons
This article was published in partnership with Funky Citizens.
