Gay-ban debate stirs up resentment in Polish election

‘ REMINDS ME OF THE 1930S’

WARSAW• Polish conservative leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski suggested banning gays from teaching children yesterday, prompting accusations he was courting the religious right three days before elections.

Mr. Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party is running neck-andneck in opinion polls with the moderate centre-right Civic Platform to be the biggest party in the next parliament.

“Homosexuals … should have normal social and citizen rights but maybe they should not be employed in certain professions,” the Law and Justice leader told a news conference.

He said he meant teaching in schools or other professions that influence children. “ Active homosexuals should not be teachers,” he said.

Gay rights groups say Mr. Kaczynski and his twin brother Lech, who will run for president in a separate election in October, have made anti-gay remarks a feature of their political appeal to less-educated, traditionalist voters in Poland.

Lech, the Mayor of Warsaw, had banned gay parades on grounds that they were harmful to children by “promoting” homosexuality.

“ This is an election game that meets fertile soil in Poland,” said Szymon Niemiec, a gay activist. “His remarks remind me of the 1930s. The Nazis also persecuted minorities.”

Poland’s ruling left, whose ratings have plunged so low that it will struggle to enter parliament, said Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s words should be a warning.

“ The Kaczynski brothers are ready to polarize society to succeed at the ballot box,” Grzegorz Napieralski, deputy head of the ruling Democratic Left Alliance, said. “It’s a bad signal. Europe and the world go in a different direction.”

The Kaczynski brothers, former anti-communist activists in the Solidarity movement, have long failed to make it to the top of Polish politics largely because of their controversial, combative and all- or-nothing style.

Reuters