Row over gay fairy tales
October 9th, 2020A left-wing columnist accuses the Prime Minister of connivance with far-right radicals who promote anti-gay propaganda. A pro-government analyst thinks that what begins as an appeal for LGBTQ rights ends up as dictatorial intolerance.
Far-right MP Dóra Dúró publicly shredded a few pages of a book where classical fairy tales are reframed as stories happening to representatives of various minorities, including gays and lesbians. When asked about the matter, PM Orbán told National Public Radio that Hungarians are tolerant but ‘there is a red line that should not be transgressed: leave our children alone’. Ms Dúró complained that she was receiving threats from unknown people, then, more recently, far-right activists put red stickers on the doors of bookstores warning that ‘homosexual publications endangering children are being sold’ there. The Association of Publishers and Booksellers protested against that campaign.
In Népszava, Judit N. Kósa accuses the Prime Minister of ‘performing music’ for an extremist audience which ‘he holds dear’. She interprets Mr Orbán’s words about the ‘red line that should not be transgressed’ as an encouragement to Ms Dúró’s ‘frightening book-shredding’. Kósa believes all this goes to show that far-right MPs can easily find a common denominator with Fidesz and nothing would prevent them from voting in one block should the government’s two-thirds majority in Parliament dwindle.
In Magyar Hírlap, László Bogár warns against creeping LGBTQ propaganda as something that threatens society as a whole. At first, he writes, activists appear merely as defenders of a minority against persecution – in a country where gay people are not at all in jeopardy. Later on, however, they would impose a new language on society, Bogár writes, quoting an editorial in the Wall Street Journal last July that defined America’s spreading ’cancel culture’ as a Jacobine style terror.