Foreign money and pressure is artificially pumping up the LGBT movement in Poland
There may be several reasons for the rapid intensification of the LGBT lobby’s demands in Poland, but one of them is undoubtedly the massive political, media, and financial support it receives from abroad, specifically North America and Western Europe.
Olivier Bault
During the rule of the PiS-led United Right coalition in Poland, i.e. from 2015 until now, major media outlets in the West have been repeating like a mantra the claim that homosexuals, or “LGBTQI+” people, are being discriminated against and even harassed in Poland. The truth is that during these eight years, a not very large but very active minority mouthing the slogans of the LGBT lobby has become more visible in the homeland of Saint John Paull II than ever before.
Worse still, this active minority has even managed to incorporate at least some of its revolutionary demands into the programs of two political groups out of the three that are likely to enter the new government coalition which is being formed by three left-liberal political blocs following Poland’s October 15 elections.
Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform, the leading party in the Civic Coalition bloc, which will have the largest number of MPs of the three, promises civil unions for same-sex couples and hints that offering the possibility for such couples to adopt children could be their next step.
The junior partner in the likely future government coalition, the New Left bloc, is going further, demanding the full range of new laws that have already been introduced in the most “advanced” Western countries, including the option to determine one’s own sex, or “gender,” without unnecessary formalities, as is now the case in Spain.
We are talking here about a grouping in which the main player is the post-communist, social-democratic SLD, which ruled the country 20 years ago. At that time it had views which were much more conservative on these kinds of issues. In Poland, as in other Central European countries, former Marxists, along with younger activists, have embraced ideologies described by many as neo-Marxist.
At the same time, the Civic Platform, which is a member of the center-right European People’s Party in the European Parliament, has followed in the footsteps of Western Europe’s center-right parties, renouncing its initial Christian Democratic values to become a typical European centrist party that has been gradually adopting all the most radical demands of the neo-Marxist left.
How could this happen in the homeland of St. John-Paul II, which is widely considered a Catholic and conservative country?
Back in 2019, the “European Coalition,” which brought together the same parties that are now likely to be part of the new government coalition, suffered a painful defeat precisely because of its vociferous promotion of LGBT demands, following the lead of Warsaw’s Civic Platform mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, who announced an LGBT+ Declaration for the Polish capital a few months before the elections.
Former President Lech Walesa himself, who supported this coalition against the United Right, summed up the elections at the time by saying bluntly, in his usual style: “We have lost because of those perverts.”
There may be several reasons for the rapid intensification of the LGBT lobby’s demands in Poland, but one of them is undoubtedly the massive political, media, and financial support it receives from abroad, specifically North America and Western Europe. After all, let’s remember that pushing the demands of the LGBT lobby around the world has become one of the official foreign policy goals of some Western countries in the past decade, with the United States and the United Kingdom at the forefront.
This is revealed particularly vividly each year during “Pride Month,” i.e. the month of June, when most street demonstrations of pride in being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, “transgender,” or in some other way a person with a non-heterosexual behavior and/or who does not identify with their own sex take place.
In Poland, these demonstrations are called equality marches or equality parades, and are generally still free of the more obscene scenes that characterize such events in the West. On the other hand, they are unfortunately not free of hate speech against those who think differently, and especially against the Catholics who constitute a relative majority in this country (85% of Poland’s population is baptized in the Catholic Church, and over 35% of them regularly attend Sunday Mass).
Although offending religious feelings is a crime in Poland, regardless of the religion you want to mock, these marches have been the scene of parodies of the Holy Mass (e.g. in 2019 in Warsaw) and of the Corpus Christi procession, where the image of the Virgin Mary was replaced by a vagina (Gdansk, 2019), and “equality parades” have taken place for several years in a row at the Jasna Gora shrine in Czestochowa, including during a nationwide children’s pilgrimage that was also taking place there (Czestochowa, 2019, when that march was once again blocked by a group of Catholics). Signs bearing the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa – the most venerated image of Our Lady in the Polish Church – with a halo in the colors of the LGBT rainbow are likewise a common sight during those parades. This is only to cite a few examples.
This does not prevent a group of ambassadors, some of whom regularly participate in the Warsaw Equality Parade, from publishing a joint open letter each year to express their support for these marches all over Poland and for the demands of the Polish LGBT lobby. As US Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher once put it, Polish conservatives are allegedly “on the wrong side of history” in this area. And this was said by an ambassador who was appointed by President Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.
This year for the first time, the U.S. ambassador himself took part in the Warsaw Equality Parade. Ambassador Mark Brzezinski showed up at the parade wearing a T-shirt bearing the Statue of Freedom in the colors of the LGBT rainbow and the words “Freedom – Equality.” The Warsaw march was held under the patronage of the city’s mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, of the Civic Platform.
Z @USAmbPoland na #ParadaRówności. Razem dla wolności i równości! 🇵🇱🇺🇸🤝 pic.twitter.com/jqdzrudMgi
— Michał Szczerba (@MichalSzczerba) June 17, 2023
This year the ambassadors’ annual letter was published on May 17, which has been designated the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. The writing and signing of this letter was coordinated by the Norwegian embassy.
“We express our support for the efforts to raise public awareness of issues affecting the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) community and other communities in Poland facing similar challenges,” the ambassadors wrote in this year’s letter, suggesting that the rights of such people are under attack in Poland.
The ambassadors further wrote: “To this end, we acknowledge the efforts of the organizers of the equality parades and marches in Bialystok, Bielsko-Biala, Czestochowa, Gdansk, Gorzow Wielkopolski, Gryfino, Jelenia Gora, Kalisz, Katowice, Kielce, Koszalin, Krakow, Legnica, Lublin, Lodz, Milicz, Olsztyn, Opole, Pila, Poznan, Rzeszow, Sanok, Slupsk, Szczecin, Sztum, Torun, Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Zielona Gora.”
This open letter, entitled “Diplomats for Equality” and made available in the Polish language, among others, on the website of the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw was signed by the ambassadors of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela, as well as representatives of the governments of Flanders and the Brussels-Capital Region, plus representatives, secretaries, and directors of nine international institutions.
In terms of the political pressure exerted by Western countries on Poland, France stood out in a special way when avowed LGBT activist Clément Beaune was Secretary of State for EU Affairs at the French Foreign Ministry from 2020 to 2022. In late 2020, Beaune informed the French, in an interview with a gay magazine, that he is a homosexual. In the same conversation he announced his intention to fight for LGBT rights in Poland and against the existence of “LGBT-free zones” in that country.
This referred, as we know, to local governments that had adopted the Local Government Charter on the Rights of Families drafted by the Ordo Iuris Institute, or resolutions declaring that they will not in any way impose or promote LGBT ideology as part of their policies, including in the running of schools in their areas.
Another issue, which should be the topic of a separate article, is the incredible financial blackmail exerted, without any legal basis, by the European Commission to force Poland’s local governments to withdraw from such declarations. This blackmail is unfortunately effective, and many local governments have canceled their earlier pledges in order to restore their access to EU funds.
Embassies and governments not only write open letters, but actively and financially support the LGBT lobby in Poland.
Every year, the U.S. Embassy announces a call for grants for programs in favor of the “LGBTQI+ community in Poland.” This year, the grants that are awarded can run up to $50,000 per organization. Only three years ago, the upper limit on the amount that LGBT lobby organizations in Poland could apply for was $20,000.
Meanwhile, the Norwegian embassy regularly boasts that part of the so-called Norwegian Funds goes to subsidize the organizing of equality parades across Poland. Norwegian Funds are monies paid by Norway to the less wealthy regions of the European Union in exchange for unrestricted access to the entire EU market as a member of the European Economic Area (EEA). The use of Norwegian Funds to finance gay demonstrations in Poland began in 2014, when the organizers of the equality marches were thrilled to announce that EEA Grants & Norway Grants (also known as Norwegian Funds) would be the main sponsor of the Equality Parade. “Norwegian Funds is the first such major sponsor of the event. As the Equality Parade grows larger every year, we hope this will also encourage others to join us,” organizers said at the time.
In addition to these and other funds paid by governments to support the LGBT movement in Poland, there are of course EU funds used for the same purpose under various pretexts.
In a report on the sources of funding for Warsaw’s LGBT organizations that was published in 2019, the Polish Ordo Iuris Institute, a pro-life and pro-family lawyers’ organization, calculated that in the previous two years these organizations had received nearly half a million euros in EU grants.
Also in 2019, the Mom and Dad Foundation (Fundacja Mamy i Taty) published a report about, among other things, the funding of LGBT organizations nationwide. As we can read in this report, “among 11 highly radicalized organizations, four have budgets at least in the tens of thousands of zlotys,” and “the key organization funding LGBT organizations in Poland is the Batory Foundation.” The Batory Foundation is a very influential, big-budget Polish organization belonging to the Soros network (George Soros himself founded it in the 1980s with the approval of the communist regime at the time).
Soros and his Open Society Foundations not only actively support various left-wing organizations in Poland, including those of the LGBT movement, but have also been increasingly present in the Polish media in recent years. These in turn play a very important role in promoting the LGBT agenda in Poland and gradually conditioning Polish society with this lobby’s most radical demands.
In 2016, the Soros-owned Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) bought a stake in Agora, which owns Gazeta Wyborcza and Radio Tok FM, and also, as of 2019, the Eurozet radio group. In late 2021–early 2022, the Dutch company Pluralis B.V., which is owned by MDIF and the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF), bought a stake in another influential daily newspaper, Rzeczpospolita. This year, Pluralis acquired a majority stake in Gremi Media, the company that owns Rzeczpospolita, and sold part of that stake to a friendly Hungarian media magnate with a very pronounced left-liberal profile.
In addition to these media outlets, the LGBT lobby’s most radical demands are openly supported by the TVN television group, which is owned by the US media company Warner Bros. Discovery. When the governing United Right coalition wanted to change the media law so that, as in other European countries (such as France and Germany), non-EEA companies could not own majority stakes in Polish TV stations, pressure from the U.S. embassy and government as well as from Brussels proved to be too strong.
The TVN Group is one of the three major television groups in Poland alongside the public TVP group and the Polsat Group, which is in the hands of Polish stockholders.
In addition to this, there are the activities of Western companies themselves in Poland.
There was the high-profile case of a Swedish Ikea employee, a Catholic who was fired after he resisted pressure from his employer to promote LGBT behavior within the company.
Some foreign corporations support the very radical demands of the LGBT lobby openly and even proudly, flaunting their presence and support at equality parades in Poland. This includes companies such as Coca-Cola, Google, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Nielsen, Universal and its Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand, Citibank, JP Morgan, MTV, Netflix, BNP Paribas, and others.
Disney+ offers its viewers in Poland a section entitled “Pride,” (Duma) decorated in the LGBT rainbow colors and offering a choice of LGBT-themed films.
Companies owned by Western corporations are increasingly training their employees to be “tolerant” and “non-discriminatory,” particularly with regard to LGBT people and LGBT behavior. And then there are the codes of ethics and codes of conduct that Western corporations impose on their Polish contractors, which include requirements for promoting LGBT attitudes.
In a word, in Poland, too, the corporate world is increasingly becoming a place where Western capital seeks to indoctrinate society in the spirit of LGBT ideology.
At a conference entitled “Freedom of Conscience and LGBT Ideology,” which took place in Warsaw on October 12, well-known Polish columnist Rafał Ziemkiewicz, who is the author of The Trolled Revolution (Strollowana Rewolucja), among other books, pointed out that the LGBT movement in Poland has very few members, and that those with inclinations falling under this acronym do not form any kind of community or separate society.
“There is no LGBT community in Poland. There may be 1.5 million people who fall under these slogans, but they do not constitute a community. They are simply part of Polish society. And into this normal society suddenly rushes some LGBT movement that wants liberation. This is the basic thing: It comes from outside. This ideology is being inculcated here,” Ziemkiewicz stressed.
It is perhaps worth adding that, unlike in most Western European countries, in Poland homosexuality was never a legally punishable act. Marriage, on the other hand, is defined in the Polish Constitution that was enacted in 1997 – that is, when the post-communist (but not yet neo-Marxist) left was in power – as the union of a man and a woman.
