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Rainy Homophobia

Friday 10 June 2005 | general

I’m sitting in our virtually empty apartment, which won’t be appended with “our” from Monday, I guess. I left the computer here so I’d have something to do during the long break. I’ve got an hour and a half now, it’s raining like crazy, with temperatures below 15 Celsius, and I’m not sure what to write about.

I could write about the attention homosexuality is getting in Poland these days, thanks to a canceled gay pride parade in Warsaw. Parade organizers didn’t fulfill all the obligations for a march, said Warsaw mayor Lech Kaczynski’s office. For example, they didn’t submit a plan for how to re-route traffic in the march area, and they didn’t pay to compensate for the money busses would lose by avoiding the parade route. Now if this had been a march for Polish veterans, I’m sure Kaczynski’s office would have been over backwards to help parade organizers. But concerning gay pride, there’ll be no bending in this country – sexual innuendo very much intended.

Last night, on a Cross-Fire type show, they were discussing the march. Some of the homophobes there were just amazing – they take this whole thing very personally. If you don’t want to see a gay pride parade, don’t watch. But of course the priest on the panel was talking about how “statistically” the “gay lifestyle” is harmful. Seventy percent of people with AIDs are gay; most pedophiles are gay pedophiles (or some ridiculous generalization like that); and so on. The priest actually said, “The homosexual lifestyle is a road to death.”

The parade organizer criticized the church, saying “Catholic” and “Fascist” in the same sentence. He now faces a lawsuit for saying that. In public, no less.

Of the people on the discussion panel, guess which ones were virtually foaming at the mouth at times? The homophobes, of course.

During the course of the show, there was a survey: Is there a problem with homophobia in Poland? Fifty-one percent said yes. Tomasz Lis, the host, commented on the station’s web site, though, the results were opposite: fifty-one percent said no.

Yes, I could write about homophobic Poland, but I don’t want to.

I could write about the weather. But what for? How much can I write about rain? It’s ridiculously cold, too. The temperature the last few days has topped out in the low 50’s. About ten days, it was literally forty degrees warmer. So the weather is not a good topic either.

Moving – there’s something. Packing so many boxes for shipping has made Kinga and me experts with tape. But who wants to read about taping?

Enough…

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