ON MAY 7, 2004, in Krakow, skinheads from a far right parliamentary party, the League of Polish Families, attacked a peaceful demonstration of gays, lesbians, and their supporters with slurs and stones and caustic acid. On November 20, in Poznan, skinheads of the League fired teargas at the feminist and anti-homophobic March of Equality. Assaults on women and minorities have risen since Poland joined the European Union on May 1, 2004. Poland’s joining the EU was seen by the League of Polish Families as a national humiliation, and support for the League has been growing in the intervening year.
Poland transitioned from Communism to Christian fundamentalism: the culture is anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-secular, and pro-Bush. Even the Pope opposed the U.S. Iraqi invasion, but the Polish president and prime minister—without consulting parliament—sent a substantial contingent to help fight Bush’s war. So Polish troops go to Iraq, women to their kitchens, gay people to hell, while the media broadcast patriotic and religious kitsch and join politicians in rallying around Bush. Poland is a “red state,” a Trojan horse of Bush’s America within the EU. “Jesusland” extends to Poland. We invade Iraq together, murkily privatize social welfare, militarize our universities and the media. To the EU, Poland is the closest European ally of the U.S.
This is Poland’s version of the current counter-Enlightenment that’s afoot in the U.S. Its elements are the sexual and economic degradation of women (particularly women artists), discrimination against gay people, and censorship of art and speech. Unlike “old Europe,” Poland is openly enthusiastic about Bush’s politics (abortion, war, a gay marriage ban), and the country was exuberant about Mel Gibson’s epic of the counter-Enlightenment, The Passion of the Christ. The leader of the League of Polish Families, Roman Giertych (b. 1971), waxed ecstatic: his party follows in the tradition of his grandfather’s (and Poland’s) anti-Semitism. The League of Polish Families came in second in the June 2004 elections to the European Parliament.
On December 9, 2004, the All-Polish Youth held a conference, “Homosexual Revolution,” at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow. The homophobic conference was endorsed by professors of Poland’s oldest university, the Jagiellonian, established in 1364. For fundamentalists, whether academic instructors or skinheads, the “homosexual revolution” is a source of both fear and fascination.
On November 5, 2004 the United Nations Human Rights Committee urged Poland for a second time to liberalize its abortion laws and to implement sex education, contraception, and gay rights programs. The Committee expressed deep concern about restrictive abortion laws in Poland, which might cause women to seek unsafe, illegal abortions, with attendant risks to their life and health. Addressing the issue of sexual orientation, the human rights panel stated: “The Committee is concerned that the right of sexual minorities not to be discriminated against is not fully recognized, and the discriminatory acts and attitudes against persons on the grounds of sexual orientation are not adequately investigated and punished. Discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation should be specifically prohibited in Polish law.”
What does the Polish situation look like in the frame of EU human rights regulations? As homosexuality had been decriminalized in Poland in 1932, the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, which put in place powers to combat discrimination based on sexual orientation and played such an important humanitarian function in other Eastern European countries, didn’t have any direct effect on local politics and legislation. Then the Treaty was followed in 2000 by the adoption of two key instruments: the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which prohibits anti-gay discrimination, and the Employment Directive, which lays down precise rules for banning it at the workplace. These form part of the Union’s so-called acquis communautaire, the laws that all new members must adopt.
In reaction to those decisions, in 2001 Poland established an Office of Governmental Plenipotentiary for the Equal Status of Women and Men, which is responsible for the fight against discrimination on several grounds, including sexual orientation. It is this office that co-financed a gay visibility campaign, “Let us be seen” (see the G&LR’s March-April 2004 issue). But in the Polish Constitution and law there are still no specific provisions against discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the Employment Directive hasn’t been implemented yet and is under legal consultation and parliamentary debate over whether to omit the category of sexual orientation in favor of a more general ban on discrimination.
The Passion of the Conversion*
“Would you please give me ten million dollars, and I’ll heal homosexuals,” said in Polish Parliament a self-styled “ex-homosexual” Richard Cohen, American “conversion therapist” and president of the International Healing Foundation. Cohen’s mincing voice and anti-gay message were intended to rebaptize Poland before its debate on the bill legalizing same-sex civil unions. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Richard Cohen’s “conversion therapy” hit Poland, hurt minorities, and harmed the fragile efforts to do away with prejudices in the ultra-traditionalist country. On March 5, 2004, The Passion had its European premiere in the National Theater of Poland; on March 17, 2004, Richard Cohen, who proselytizes gay-to-straight conversion, had a presentation in Polish Parliament. Gibson and Cohen recycle and reinvigorate anti-Semitism, bigotry, and homophobia.
“The reason I ask for ten million dollars is because we need to create social organizations to help homosexuals to change. If you want to push legislation, somebody introduce a bill for the healing of homosexuality. That should really screw up homosexual activists.” Richard Cohen called upon Polish Parliament to reject the bill legalizing same-sex unions. In a country of twenty per cent unemployment and new poverty, Cohen pleaded for ten million dollars to fight homosexuality.
“The Promotion of Homosexuality in Social Life and Its Effects for the Human Person, Family, and Culture” was the title of Cohen’s presentation in Polish Parliament, to which he was invited by the League of Polish Families. The leader of the League, Roman Giertych, wants to change the penal code and has introduced a bill in parliament that would penalize, through fine or even imprisonment, those who publicly promote the change of the “traditional” definition of marriage. The Green Party of Poland granted Giertych the title of the Homophobe of the Year. Maciej Giertych (b. 1936), an activist in the League of Polish Families and the father of Roman, participated in the Parliament meeting with Richard Cohen. A specialist in the biology of trees (dendrology), he boasted during the meeting that he had translated the “Homosexuality and Hope” statement of the U.S. Catholic Medical Asociation on “possibilities of change and the negative consequences associated with homosexual activity,” but complained that he could never obtain copyrights for publishing it in Poland. (Roman’s grandfather, Jedrzej Giertych, 1903–1992, was the author of a 1938 book whose title translates as “Toward Ending the Crisis,” where he called for the expulsion of Jews from Poland.)
“Mr. Richard Cohen will speak on the understanding and cure of homosexuality as help for the human person, family, and civilizaton,” intoned a priest on Poland’s mass-audience Radio Maryja, which furthers the ideology of fundamentalism. It was a campily sweet voice that advertized Cohen’s speech for a fortnight. The program took four hours. When Cohen was on the air, he emitted the Polish equivalent of “yuck” to express what he takes to be a universal disgust for gays. On the radio program he was paired with Ludwika Sadowska, professor of medicine, who swallowed the “u” in homoseksualizm (“homosexuality”) and equated it with abnormality, pathology, and disease. Sadowska’s unsophisticated elocution matched her simple medicalization of homosexuality: she sounded like a broken record of stereotypes out of 1950’s sexology. The Polish priest who hosted the program condemned “easy and cheap toleration, which is in fact a way of death.” Cohen accused gays of a world conspiracy, likened it to Communism, and exhorted: “I challenge you, Poland, to be a world leader in solving homosexuality!”
On Radio Maryja, Richard Cohen asked a rhetorical question: “One is not born homosexual—who would like to be born a leper in the society?” Gays, according to him, can renounce their unfortunate attraction, and only then do they become fully human. Cohen’s fallacious thinking was never called into question in the Polish media. Radio Maryja and the newspaper Nasz Dziennik lauded him. Other media made bare mention of Cohen, without endorsing or questioning his method. Among them, Poland’s most influential mass circulation newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, posted the Catholic Press Agency story on Cohen’s visit, without commentary: “Richard Cohen himself experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation. The decisive moment was, as he indicates, his meeting of Christ. Cohen who had professed Judaism became a Christian.”
In fall 2003 Gazeta Wyborcza featured in its section “Science” the research of Robert L. Spitzer, a Columbia professor who researches “reparative therapies” for sexual orientation change. In February 2004, the paper blared on its front page the supposed discovery of the HIV-positive status of Wojciech K., who’s on trial for pedophilia. The paper’s coverage of this case reinforced Poland’s habit of confusing pedophilia and homosexuality. Wprost, a mass-circulation news magazine, followed Gazeta Wyborcza in tearing the rights and dignity of Wojciech K. to shreds, while adding infamy to insult by claiming to have uncovered an international conspiracy of gays to spread HIV. And yet, when Zycie Warszawy and TVN network reported an actual jump in HIV infections in Poland in 2004 (seventy percent of them in heterosexuals), Gazeta Wyborcza and Wprost remained silent—this, in a country without sex education at schools or safe sex campaigns in the media.
The ideas of Mel Gibson and Richard Cohen have found a receptive audience in Poland because they use Catholicism to confirm a pre-existing hatred of otherness. The faithful were bussed to movie theaters by their local parishes to weep through The Passion of the Christ. Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the head of the Polish Church, pronounced the picture to be “pre-eminent” and recommended that everyone see it. Film critic Bartosz Zurawiecki was taken in, too. In a popular magazine, Przekroj, he proclaimed: “Gibson did not sin.” The Passion belongs to what Camille Paglia dubbed a class of “vulgar horror films awash in red slop,” as opposed to “psychological high Gothic.” The violence of Gibson’s picture slides into butchery as whips and scourges do their deadly flogging and flaying. The flagellation, which appears prominently in medieval iconography from Sebastiano del Piombo to Albrecht Dürer, is taken in Gibson’s film to the nausea-inducing extreme.
“Mel Gibson faithfully follows the biblical events,” declared Polish critic Bartosz Zurawiecki—wrongly, as the filmmaker was inspired by the mysticism of Anna Katharina Emmerich (1774–1824), a stigmatic nun in Westphalia whose visions were written down by Romantic poet Clemens Brentano. Biblical scholars (P. Riegler, L. Richen, M. Meinertz) have proven that her apparitions were incompatible with the topography and history of the Bible. In line with the visions of Emmerich, the movie is saturated with anti-Semitism. As Rabbi Marvin Hier, Wiesenthal Center Dean and Founder, declared: “Our disagreement is with Mel Gibson, whose own personal embellishments of the Gospel stereotype and denigrate the masses of Jews who were not followers of Jesus.”
Is Poland having its own culture wars? The ideas of Gibson and Cohen are appealing to the country’s popular pieties. A Catholic weekly, Gosc Niedzielny, ran a story called “‘Saint’ Mel.” Although the word “saint” was in quotation marks, the article came close to hagiography in describing the elements of Gibson’s life: an Australian with an Irish background, alcoholism followed by conversion to integrist Catholicism, addiction to the Latin mass and traditional morality, construction of his own church edifice. Gibson and Cohen rehash and reinforce old Polish prejudices. On Radio Maryja, Cohen appealed to the listeners to call on their MPs to reject the same-sex civil union bill. In Polish Parliament, the proponent of “conversion therapy” appealed for money—predictably so. In the end, Gibson and Cohen preach to the converted and deepen their prejudices.
Tomek Kitlinski and Pawel Leszkowicz, who are partners, are GLBT activists and scholars living in Poland.
