Lithuania MPs ban gay ‘promotion’

Lithuanian lawmakers voted overwhelmingly yesterday to overturn a presidential veto of a child-protection law that bans what supporters say is the promotion of homosexuality.

The law, due to come into force in March 2010, bars the “public dissemination” of information favourable to homosexuality, claiming it could harm the mental health and physical, intellectual and moral development of youngsters.

The legislation - which also covers bisexuality, polygamy, images of heterosexual intercourse, death and severe injury, the paranormal, foul language and bad eating habits - does not specifically define public dissemination nor set down the punishment for offenders.

Eighty-six of the Baltic state’s 141 lawmakers voted in favour, while six were against, 25 abstained, and the remainder did not take part.

“Parliament has demonstrated its will to institutionalise homophobia,” Vladimir Simonko, head of the Lithuanian Gay League, told AFP.

Homosexuality is frowned upon by many in Lithuania, where the vast majority of the population of 3.3mn is Roman Catholic.

Sixty-seven lawmakers had approved the bill on June 16, but Lithuania’s outgoing president Valdas Adamkus refused to sign it.

Under Lithuania’s constitution, supporters of the law needed at least 71 votes to override his veto, a threshold they passed with ease.

Adamkus retired on Sunday after serving out two five-year terms. His successor, Dalia Grybauskaite, cannot re-impose a veto.

There was no immediate comment from her office to suggestions that she or gay rights campaigners were considering further legal action to try and stop the law coming into effect.

Opponents argue the law is not only homophobic but will also impose broad censorship and violate Lithuania’s commitments as a member of the UN and the European Union.

Human rights group Amnesty International had repeatedly urged parliament not to approve it.

Simonko said Lithuanian campaigners were disappointed they had not been given a wider hearing.

“We contacted everyone, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the UN, but nothing worked. I’m sounding the alarm again,” he said.

In 2007 and 2008, municipal authorities in the capital Vilnius and Lithuania’s second city Kaunas banned EU-sponsored anti-discrimination events, which did not just focus on homosexuality.

Authorities have also barred local campaigners from holding several public gatherings.

Gay rights campaigners from Lithuania and neighbouring Latvia and Estonia are nonetheless planning to hold a high-profile “Baltic Pride” march in Vilnius next May.

This May, the annual event was held in Latvia and passed off peacefully after heavy policing kept apart marchers and anti-gay demonstrators who had attacked previous rallies.

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It takes guts to shut down free speech? Regardless of one's opinion on homosexuality, shutting down debate is not the way to deal with the issue.

Debate we must. The concept of free speech has been driven to absurd lengths that are ultimately destructive to a free society. Struggles to reestablish organic social limits on harmful speech will become increasingly urgent around the world as the burgeoning of 24/7 media relentlessly promotes collective hedonism instead of private responsibility.

When the freedom of speech concept was written into our Founding, our nation already self-policed speech in the private sector. It was a free society, but one in which the vast majority freely practiced various denominations of Western religious morality, with strict punishments for economic and moral slackers, scant welfare provisions and a strong republican system allowing local governments to enforce community standards.

Sexual behaviors divorced from legal responsibility for marriage and family result in neglectful, deteriorated or absent ties not only between parents, but also between them and their biological offspring — social trends that have sharply spiked following the liberalization of speech and obscenity rulings.

Pieties of this atheist legal religion obligate taxpaying citizens to assume the economic burden not only of carelessly spawned, unwanted children, but also of their biological parents, foster parents and a costly administrative network of social services, failed contraceptive theories, deteriorated public health and a holocaust of abortions.

There are forms of speech that do damage. I believe there will be many experiments around the globe attempting to limit speech. The clumsy "politically correct" and "hate speech" agendas are one such attempt, which ultimately protects hedonism and dependence on government rather than expecting personal responsibility. The pendulum must swing back, or freedom of conscience is doomed.

Socialist/feminist/fascist trends relentlessly separate biological parents from their rights and responsibilities for the care of their own young, placing children at the mercy of adult exploitation, both sexual and political. Destroying the family degrades the quality of the citizens we are producing. Libertine social trends reward the strongest, richest, prettiest, sexiest and most influential players at the expense of the youngest, oldest, poorest, most economically self-sufficient and most vulnerable. It is a social devolution that elevates the primitive instincts over the classical Western virtues.

—"Albion Wilde"

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