At the initiative of Dániel Turgonyi, deputy mayor in charge of education, Budapest’s 3rd district now has a child protection program for kindergartens operated by the gay rights organization, Rocking Horse Foundation for Children’s Rights (Hintalovon Gyermekjogi Alapítvány), conservative daily Magyar Nemzet reports.
“We believe that the safety of children is a public issue, and we will help make the institutions safer and more transparent in the future,” the website set up on Oct. 1 writes, adding that the foundation will help the municipality “highlight the issue of child protection and present the planned steps and programs that will make it more transparent” in kindergartens.
Budapest’s 3rd district, Óbuda-Békásmegyer, has a population of 130,000, making its population the equivalent of Hungary’s seventh largest city.
The Rocking Horse Foundation also operates the child protection website yelon.hu, which among other things says that “our sexual identity has very little to do with our [biological] gender identity.”
The same foundation also ran a child protection program at the Pannonhalma Benedictine High School, but the church severed all ties with them as they found that the values propagated by them are opposite to the church’s teachings.
Turgonyi, who is openly gay, is a member of the centrist Momentum Party established in 2017, and also the president of the party’s LGBT working group.
In a recent controversy over a storybook featuring gay characters, Turgonyi condemned the action of far right party vice-president Dóra Dúró after she shredded a copy of the book in protest.
In the book, “Meseország mindenkié” (“Wonderland Belongs to Everyone”), a dozen young authors reinterpret classic Hungarian folk tales portraying the protagonists as belonging to “oppressed minorities”. Pöttöm Panna, for example, the Hungarian iteration of Thumbelina, is a Roma servant girl.
“I realized that I had to react, [and] not because, as a gay person, she also attacks me too when she shreds a book,” Turgonyi wrote in a Facebook post.
Title image: Dániel Turgonyi, deputy mayor in charge of education in Budapest’s 3rd district. (source: Facebook)
