WARSAW, Poland (LifeSiteNews) — Poland’s new liberal government has published proposed legislation that would criminalize public criticism of LGBT ideology as “hate speech,” with three years in prison for what the government deems “insults” against a person’s “sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Last week, the Polish Ministry of Justice published a draft amendment to the nation’s penal code, expanding the scope of its “hate speech” laws to include “sexual orientation or gender identity.” Conservative Poles have denounced the move as a power grab aimed at silencing public debate on LGBT issues, in particular Catholic teaching on sexual morality and marriage, which punctuated the pontificate of the Polish Pope John Paul II.
READ: Lawmakers introduce legislation to legalize abortion in traditionally Catholic, pro-life Poland
The draft of the new legislation states:
The introduction of the proposed solutions will ensure enhanced and full criminal law protection against the use of violence or unlawful threats, incitement to hatred, insults and violations of bodily integrity due to the disability, age, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity of the injured party.
Under the proposed amendment, “unlawful threats” would face penalties of up to five years in prison, while those who fall foul of the loosely defined “insults” charge face up to three years behind bars.
Conservative Confederation Party MP Karina Bosak denounced the proposed law, warning that it will curtail freedom of speech and criminalize Christian teachings. On Good Friday, she said, “The ruling coalition, as part of its coalition agreement, has announced that they want to penalize so-called hate speech. The current left-wing Deputy Minister of Justice Krzysztof Śmiszek, from the New Left, has stated that his department is currently working on introducing these regulations, which limit freedom of speech and public debate in Poland. We, as the Confederation, strongly oppose this. The direct consequence of criminalizing certain words will, in fact, be the criminalization of conservative, religious, Christian views.”
READ: Trudeau government abandoning long-threatened ‘hate speech’ bill after backlash
Dobromir Sośnierz, another Confederation party member, stressed the way in which the law can be easily manipulated so that any speech liberal leftists do not like will be dubbed “hate speech” as a political tool against critical opponents.
“What the left understands by so-called hate speech, in practice, will mean speech hated by Minister Śmiszek, not necessarily speech that expresses hatred towards someone, but something that leftists dislike,” Sośnierz warned.
The new law follows closely on a court case last fall, in which a Polish court ruled in favor of Google, allowing the tech giant to maintain its removal of two videos that publicized Catholic teaching on LGBT ideology. The censorship was allowed on the grounds that the content of the videos was “hate speech.”
In October 2023, a district court in Warsaw rejected a lawsuit brought by the editor of the Polish weekly Do Rzeczy, Paweł Lisicki, who sued Google for censoring and removing two editions of a Catholic program on YouTube channel wSensie.tv. The videos offered Catholic teaching on LGBT related issues.
Without giving a legal definition of the term, the court ruled that the programs promoted “hate speech,” claiming the views presented were “highly damaging.” The court ignored the fact that what was presented was Catholic teaching on the matter.
READ: Ireland vows to crack down on ‘hate speech’ after knife attack by Algerian immigrant
Denouncing the censorship when the videos were first removed in 2019, Lisicki accused Google of attempting to silence critics of LGBT ideology and exclude the Church’s perspective from public discussion and debate in the predominantly Catholic country.
Prior to the present left-wing takeover of the Polish government, efforts were underway to wholly ban transgender surgeries for minors. In May 2023, the Catholic think tank Ordo Iuris was working on legislation to ban “sex-change” operations on minors, with up to three years in prison for doctors who violated the law and mutilated or chemically sterilized any child.
In answer to left-wing criticism from Members of Parliament published in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Jerzy Kwaśniewski, the head of Ordo Iuris, denounced the transgender “maiming” and “chemical castration of kids,” saying on X:
It’s time to stop maiming kids. Time to ban the chemical castration of kids. We’ve had enough of child tragedies that have resulted from children being gender-brainwashed and then wanting to return to normality when it’s too late once their bodies have been maimed and hormonal balance disturbed.
In another post he declared, “Enough harm and suffering of children, who were manipulated into irreversible mutilation and castration by transition industry and woke fashion.”
Polish most influential liberal newspaper @rzeczpospolita informs on first page of our initiative to ban minors’ transitions.
Enough harm and suffering of children, who were manipulated into irreversible mutilation and castration by transition industry and woke fashion. pic.twitter.com/sFgM3ebJWv
— Jerzy Kwaśniewski (@jerzKwasniewski) May 10, 2023
The proposed Polish law comes on the heels of similar draconian “hate speech” laws in Scotland and Ireland. The Scottish law prompted Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling to publicly challenge authorities to arrest her for criticisms of transgender ideology and abuse of women in comments that would possibly qualify under the law as “hate speech.”
In a post denouncing the new Scottish law, she wrote, “The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women’s and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, honours and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.”
“For several years now, Scottish women have been pressured by their government and members of the police force to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears, repudiate biological facts and embrace a neo-religious concept of gender that is unprovable and untestable,” she wrote.
“I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Rowling added.
RELATED
JK Rowling dares Scottish police to arrest her over new ‘hate crime’ law threatening free speech