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VILNIUS, Lithuania, August 19, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – In a strong manifesto, a coalition of Lithuanian religious and intellectual leaders, including heroes of the anti-communist resistance, condemned the 2016 Baltic Pride Parade as an attack on human nature and the public good that follows in the path of the Soviet Union’s assault on the traditional family.
Audrius Makauskas, a spokesman for a group named Vilnius Forum, told LifeSiteNews that Lithuanian intellectuals were not going to cave in to homosexual threats like their Western counterparts.
“We are a country that had experienced and still remembers the Soviet experiment. We rejected the norms of the new Communist morality that were imposed by those who claimed to be leading us into a bright future. The more brutally these so-called progressive norms were being thrust upon us, the more vehemently we opposed them. So it shall be this time as well,” Makauskas promised.
The group's statement assertd the LGBT campaign goes well beyond equal rights for its members but is “the continuation of unsuccessful attempts by the 20th century’s totalitarian regimes — Soviet Communism and German National Socialism — to create a 'new man of the future … and a new society.'” This project is “contrary to common sense and scientific knowledge” that is “currently being conducted in Western countries.”
Homosexuality is evidently a tough sell in Lithuania. When the Baltic Pride March began in 2010, the host city had to be forced by a court order to participate. Police have resorted to tear gas to suppress popular resistance at subsequent parades, and the makers of the video promoting this year’s parade thought it prudent to fill the opening screen with a heterosexual couple with child.
The video proclaimed, “There are many of us and numbers count,” but a crowd funding campaign raised just $3,393 in two months — 23 percent below its target. The march drew 2,000, according to press coverage.
But worst of all, the LGBT movement is opposed by many of the nation’s scholars in the Vilnius Forum, who perhaps value the Christian and Western intellectual tradition more than their Western counterparts because they had to defend it against brutal National Socialist or Communist suppression for decades in the 20th century. Two Christian leaders who led the resistance and signed the anti-Pride statement, Makauskas said, were Archbishop Sigitas Tamkevičius and Bishop Jonas Kauneckas. (The archbishop published an underground journal about Soviet suppression until caught and sent to the Gulag.)
While the homosexual lobby has accused conservative opponents of reviving the Soviet Union’s alleged suppression of sexuality, the Vilnius Forum corrects the historic record in its statement, pointing out that “the ideology of genderism arose directly from 19th century Marxist communism, which had set itself the goal of destroying both the foundations of the old society and the concept of family.”
The conservative leaders also accused the LGBT movement, with the support of Western governments, of using “moral and psychological terror” to silence their opponents. What's more, the leaders say, its goals are “contrary to the vital interests of the nation,” which is extinction unless its low birth rate can be raised.
The full manifesto, sent exclusively in English translation to LifeSiteNews:
Appeal to the citizens of the Republic of Lithuania and to the country’s government
Regarding the forced imposition of the Communist “sexual revolution” and the Baltic Pride parade
The Baltic Pride 2016 parade, organised in Vilnius on June 18th, is yet another step towards obtrusion in Lithuania of the anti-human ideology of genderism, which goes against human nature. It states that a person can choose his or her own gender identity, regardless of their biological sex. Also it claims that all and any sexual behaviours are tantamount to a family based on the union between a man and a woman. This ideology, contrary to common sense and scientific knowledge, is the basis for an experiment in anthropological and social engineering, currently being conducted in Western countries — i.e. the creation of a new human being and a new society. It is the continuation of the 20th century’s totalitarian regimes’ — Soviet Communism and German National Socialism — unsuccessful attempts to implement projects to create a “new man of the future”. The main goal of this project is to deny true human nature and replace it with a vision of a “freely created” or “socially constructed” nature. The upcoming parade is an attempt to once again forcibly transfer this subtle coercion of thought to Lithuania.
The ideology of genderism is being thrust upon the public through open and audacious propagandistic lies. The demands of the LGBT movement are presented as a struggle for “new” and “progressive” ideas and their actual content is covered up by slogans advocating for so-called “European values”. Using the fact that many important aspects of the history of the Soviet regime are still unknown and concealed from the public, those behind the ideology of genderism cynically portray supporters of the natural family of a man and a woman as being admirers of Communist totalitarianism, still mentally trapped in the Soviet past. By erasing historical memory in this way, it is attempted to conceal from the ideologically indoctrinated public the fact that most of the gender ideology is simply an updated and modernised version of Marxist Communism.
The ideology of genderism arose directly from 19th c. Marxist communism, which had set itself the goal of destroying both the foundations of the “old society” and the concept of family, as a “bourgeois remnant”. This goal was practically implemented in Lenin-led Bolshevik Russia. In the years 1918−1922 it became the first country in the world where the communist experiment of “sexual revolution” had been carried out at the state level. During this time the Bolshevik Russian government had implemented the same objectives and requirements that today are raised in the Western countries by LGBT activists and supporters of their “progress”. This experiment was terminated only at the end of the third decade of the 20th century. This was done not because, in principle, the idea of the Marxist “sexual revolution” had been renounced and the goal to destroy the natural family was repudiated. It was a forced step for the Soviet Union’s communist leadership, dictated by the already-pronounced catastrophic moral and social consequences of the conducted experiment on Soviet society — an enormous spread in venereal diseases, teenage pregnancies, thousands of children having never known their parents, total break-up of social relations.
However, Soviet Russia was not the only training ground for the “sexual revolution”. In Western countries, the popular communistic ideas were disseminated by the numerous and powerful Communist and Socialist parties and the layers of “progressive forces” that were sympathetic to them. In the 1960s, Western countries also began to experience the currently still-continuing communist idea-based “sexual revolution”, many leaders and participants of which today occupy high and influential positions in leading EU institutions. That is why the deepening of EU integration inevitably became also the export of the “sexual revolution” to the new EU members in Central and Eastern Europe. The ideas of Marxist-Leninist communism maintained and revitalized in the West, in the form of the ideology of genderism, though morally and politically bankrupt, are once again being thrust upon the nations that liberated themselves from Communist oppression.
In spreading ideology of genderism in Lithuania, there are no qualms to falsify the history of the Soviet period by spreading the lie that Communists “banned sex”. “Putin’s card” is also being cynically manipulated — those who disagree with the ongoing ideological indoctrination are publicly announced as being supporters of Russia’s autocratic leader. Traditional values in all countries are a serious obstacle to the LGBT movement’s plans for “revolutionary” reorganisation of society. Therefore, such values are everywhere attempted to be discredited through the portrayal of the Russian president as a defender of these values. In fact, it is the organisers and participants of the Baltic Pride parade, claiming to spread “European values”, that are pushing Lithuania into the embrace of V. Putin’s Russia, infamous for its abortions, divorce and promiscuity. Openly mocking the moral standards and common sense acceptable to the majority of the country’s citizens, humiliating the nation, they are expanding the ranks of potential supporters of the autocracy that claims to espouse traditional values.
It is necessary to stop the spread of the ideological lie that Lithuania harbours an atmosphere of hostility and hatred towards persons of different sexual orientation. The country’s society is well aware that most of these people are simply hostages and potential victims of an experiment that does not originate in Lithuania and which is funded from abroad. Instead of helping them live with their issues, these people are being convinced that the only problem is their environment — social disapproval of attempts to make homosexuality a behavioural norm. We are a country that had experienced and still remembers the Soviet experiment. We rejected the norms of “new communist morality” that were imposed by those who claimed to be leading us into a “bright future”. The more brutally these “progressive” norms were being thrust upon us, the more vehemently we opposed them.
So it shall be this time as well. The LGBT-professed ideology of genderism and the creation, on its basis, of a new morality, is contrary to the vital interests of the State and the Nation. First of all — to the goal of strengthening stable families and encouraging an increase in the birth rate, to prevent the extinction of the nation. The practical implementation of this ideology and any support for its disseminators’ objectives need to be seen as a deliberate destruction of the Nation and the State. The ideology of genderism, hiding behind the slogans of “equality” and “tolerance”, is implemented in all countries against the will of their citizens. Advocates of the family unit consisting of a man and a woman are “democratically” silenced, the new ideologues call them out as professing hatred and being enemies of human rights; they are pushed beyond the limits of a normal debate. To silence opponents, often invoked are legal measures and even forms of physical coercion, as enforced by the state; this has happened in some of the “more progressive” US states or the Nordic countries. This ideology is enforced by creating and maintaining purposefuly an atmosphere of moral and psychological terror instilling in people fear of loss of employment, business or social status due to stating of an improper opinion. In countries increasingly usurped by ideology of genderism is being formed and strengthened governing of society based on the principle of “political correctness” which is a special form and variety of totalitarian façade democracy.
It would be a mistake to believe in appeals to freedom of expression by those who disseminate the ideology of genderism. Demanding the freedom of expression for LGBT parades today, in the future the same people and organisations will be demanding to ban advocacy of the natural family of a man and a woman and any opposition to LGBT goals. In the Internet age it is easy enough to verify that this is already statutory or at least being considered by a number of Western countries that have legalised same-sex “marriages”. The words “father” and “mother” are replaced by “parent 1” and “parent 2”, and people who refuse to refer to persons by their invented sex are punished, as are schools that do not allow students to choose between bathrooms of either sex. The extent of reality denial is illustrated by the fact that, for example, in New York, 31 “gender identities” have been recognised. Efforts to change society’s conception of family and gender to “free choice” are inevitably totalitarian and suppress freedom of expression, as soon as it is politically possible to do so. This is because ideology of genderism requires to deny the provisions of morality and common sense held by the majority of the population, and it can feel safe only when no one can publicly oppose it. This necessity to silence critics is being hidden and publicly justified by the supposedly fine desire to not offend “other” people’s feelings.
Our freedom can only be preserved by not allowing the ideology of genderism, which dehumanises us, to fully take hold. We should not allow ourselves to be marginalised and called a “dark” or “backward” nation. Let us put an end also to stigmatisation and humiliation of our state. Let us not allow foreign ambassadors to blatantly interfere in the internal affairs of our country and tell us what moral and cultural norms we must follow — we, a nation having old and long-lasting traditions of our culture and statehood.
Our country has for a long time maintained traditions of tolerance and peaceful coexistence of different peoples. They will remain as such. Lithuanians have not hated and will not hate sexual minorities and, moreover, will not fight with them. However, we are nation that has survived communist oppression and, at the cost of many sacrifices, regained our freedom. We did not regain our freedom for this, and we will never reconcile with the return to Lithuania, through Brussels and the other Western European capitals, of totalitarian, albeit differently packaged, Marxist-Leninist ideas that refute the intelligence, conscience and dignity of free people. The government, supporting such disastrous ideas and fostering its advocates, still has a chance to reconsider.
We ask it to revoke its authorisation for this parade of such an aggressively provocative nature. By mocking our society’s moral provisions and common sense, it contributes most to the creation of confrontations between sexual minorities and the majority of our citizens. The ban of such a parade would not be an undemocratic act. Every nation can and must define the reasonable limits of freedom of expression. The basis for this is clearly indicated in Article 25 of the Constitution — the need to guarantee the protection of citizens’ morals. Enough pretending that the LGBT parade is only one of many various political demonstrations, supposedly not having any clear goal to negate and change society’s norms of morality. It isn’t too late for the government to decide who it stands with — the new enslavers of Lithuania, those who will destroy our freedom, or with its own Nation, aiming to remain free.