(22 Aug 2021) LGBT ACTIVISTS HOLD COLOURFUL MARCH IN POLAND
Parades for LGBT rights took place under heavy police presence on Saturday at the foot of Catholic Poland’s most revered monastery in Czestochowa, in the south, and in Gdansk, on the Baltic coast.
The massive police presence, which included officers on horseback, was seen as the factor that prevented any clashes with far-right groups, which shouted anti-LGBT slogans like “No homosexual love” at the marchers in Czestochowa.
There had been previous cases of violence by far-right groups against Equality Parades in Poland, especially in Czestochowa, at the foot of Poland’s 15th-century Jasna Gora Monastery.
The far-right groups have support from Poland’s right-wing, nationalist government, which stresses the nation’s historic attachment to traditional Catholic values.
Czestochowa’s 3rd Equality Parade was undisturbed Saturday even though far-right activists came from other cities to show their opposition to it.
“This is a clear provocation, because LGBT circles have always been anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, you can even say. So their march in this direction, into the heart of the Polish nation, into the heart of Polish Catholicism, is an open provocation,” Bartlomiej Czuchnowski, the 26-year-old head of a regional far-right youth organisation in Opole, southwestern Poland, told The Associated Press.
An LGBT activist and student from Czestochowa, Malgorzata Mroz, who took part in the parade in Czestochowa, said she is afraid of reprisals from counter-demonstrations but that she "cannot hide in the house out of fear."
The march in Gdansk was attended by the city's mayor, Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, and by the ambassadors of some European Union countries.
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