STRASBOURG, France, January 27, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The European Parliament this week has issued a condemnation of a Lithuanian a bill that seeks to prohibit the “public promotion of homosexual relations.” The bill proposes fines of between €580 and €2,900; it has not yet been passed by the Plenary of the Lithuanian Parliament and is still under review.
The January 19th plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg voted in favor of a resolution, “on violation of freedom of expression and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Lithuania.”
Put forward by a coalition of Liberals, Socialists, Greens, and the European United Left/Nordic Green left groups in conjunction with Europe’s leading homosexualist lobby groups, the resolution calls on the Lithuanian government to “enable minors to freely access information on sexual orientation.”
The resolution followed on a series of “worrying events,” including the attempted banning by local Lithuanian authorities of “gay pride” marches and “the use by leading politicians and parliamentarians of inflammatory or threatening language and hate speech,” the MEPs said.
They also objected to a decision of the Lithuanian Committee on Education, Science and Culture to delete “sexual orientation” from the list of grounds deserving protection in the equal opportunities provisions of the Law on Education.
The resolution quoted a report from the Fundamental Rights Agency on “Homophobia, transphobia and discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity” of November 2010 that said the Lithuanian bill “could potentially criminalise almost any public expression or portrayal of, or information about, homosexuality.”
The group European Dignity Watch (EDW), a pro-democracy NGO that monitors European institutions, condemned the resolution, calling it a violation of Lithuania’s national sovereignty and saying it is outside the purview of the European Parliament.
“Once again, the European Parliament ignores the principle of subsidiarity,” EDW director Sophia Kuby said. “The resolution voted this week is an ideologically motivated infringement with the principle of subsidiarity.”
The resolution, Kuby said, was promoted and pushed through by a group of MEPs holding “radical views” in support of Europe’s powerful homosexualist lobby.
“The resolution abuses Member State sovereignty by calling for European intervention in the national legislative process. Furthermore, it calls for even further EU policy documents and actions on an issue which is already adequately covered by multiple other instruments.”
This is not the first time the European Parliament, at the behest of homosexualist activists and their supporting MEPs, has attempted to quash Lithuanian laws. In June 2009, the Lithuanian parliament voted overwhelmingly to ban the dissemination of materials promoting homosexual, bisexual or polygamous relations to minors. That prompted the European Parliament to vote for a resolution asking the country to review the law, calling it “homophobic.”
European Dignity Watch has also warned European leaders that the political culture extolling “equality” is paradoxically turning into a systematic suppression of freedom of religious expression. The EU’s “Equal Treatment Directive,” Kuby said, “aims to impose governmental control over the social and economic behavior of citizens in the widest possible sense.”