Hungary’s child protection law is facing a coordinated attack now from both the EU and the UN, with a host of countries going to extreme lengths to inject themselves into Hungary’s domestic political affairs.
Yesterday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) decided that the so-called rule of law or conditionality mechanism can be applied to Hungary to withhold European recovery and development funds over Hungary’s child-protection legislation. On the same exact day, the UN’s Human Rights Council (HRC) also launched its own attack on the Hungarian legislation.
The efforts to stop Hungary’s child-protection legislation have now become a multi-pronged effort from international organizations at the highest level, ranging from the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament, and now the UN.
The Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet has learned that in its latest report about the Hungary, the UN published a set of demands from certain member states pushing Hungary to abolish its new child-protection law that punishes pedophilia more severely, but crucially also prohibits the spreading of LGBTQ ideology in schools and kindergartens. This has become the focus of a number of attacks in the UN report on Hungary, which is backed by representatives from countries ranging from the United States to tiny Liechtenstein.
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The Hungarian government believes that it is primarily the parents’ right and duty to decide how children are brought up and educated about questions related to their sexual behavior and gender identity. Government politicians have also emphasized multiple times that it is their country’s sovereign right to decide about these issues and neither other governments, nor supra-national entities like the EU or the UN should interfere in these matters. However, some left-wing governments, as well as the current U.S. administration, took a different opinion.
During the debate on Hungary, the representative of the U.S. opined that in Hungary there is ongoing discrimination against “refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, women and girls, Roma, Muslims, Jews and LGBTQs.” In other words, she implied that Hungarians are xenophobes, misogynists, racist, islamophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic, etc, which is quite the verdict for a free and democratic country that is a member of the EU and NATO.
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The U.S. has also called on the government to repeal the legislation banning the promotion of LGBTQ in the media, and legislation prohibiting the legal recognition of the gender identity of transgender people. In other words, the U.S. is demanding that Hungarians change their constitution, which states that there are two genders, man and woman, and parenting is also tied to a female mother and male father.
Presently, there are no equivalent demands toward the U.S. to change its constitution to suit the Hungarian government’s political agenda. The government of Viktor Orbán is also not making demands towards Australian politicians to change their laws despite the Australians reserving themselves the right to interfere in Hungary’s internal matters, demanding that Hungary repeals its laws that prohibit certain forms of discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity with people under the age of 18. According to the HRC report, Ireland has also jumped into the fray, accusing Hungarian legislators of using the child-protection law as an excuse to stigmatize the LGBTQ community and demanding the law be repealed.
The UN representatives of the tiny states of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein have also found it a useful distraction from their own perpetual money laundering scandals to lecture the Hungarian government, calling on it to ensure at the national level that all textbooks and educational materials “objectively” portray sexual orientation and gender identity and promote tolerance and respect for LGBTQ persons. The drive towards an “objective” LGBTQ education, as determined by the progressive governments of Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, should of course override the democratic will of the Hungarian electorate, as well as the interests of children.
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It no surprise that in the HRC report representatives of other left-wing governments, such as Norway, Iceland, Austria, the Netherlands and Spain have all raised their voices against what they called a ban on the “promotion of homosexuality” among minors. Austria had protested against what they called “an unsustainable link between homosexuality and pedophilia,” even though there are a number of studies that suggest just that, such as the study from Freund and Watson writing that the ratio of heterosexual to homosexual pedophiles was calculated to be 11:1. While the UN representative of Iceland’s governing eco-socialist Left-Green movement (Vinstri græn) demanded that Hungary ensures children’s “right” to comprehensive sex education, including education on the full diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities.
According to media reports, the Hungarian government is preparing a statement rejecting the above UN recommendations.
