WARSAW, Poland, June 12, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― The Polish president has pledged to protect children from the LGBT agenda.
President Andrzej Duda, 48, is running for re-election on June 28. His campaign includes a “Family Card” listing his many pro-family policies. The manifesto includes a subheading called “Protection of children from LGBT ideology.”
This section promises “an end to ideological LGBT propaganda in public institutions” and “the right of parents to decide in what spirit to shape their children.” It includes a belief that “parents above all are responsible for the sexual education of their children” and expresses support for “the parents’ decisive influence on the form and substance of optional classes in schools.”
It also offers “help for families who want to homeschool.”
In other sections, the “Family Card” pledges financial support for families, help for senior citizens, and help for single parents.
On June 10, President Duda told supporters that the family is crucial to Poland and that the traditional definition of marriage will prevail.
“The family deserves special support from the state,” he said. “The family protects and builds society.”
“Our identity has helped us to weather the toughest times in childhood. The Polish family has preserved our values. The family is a special value, which demands special protection from the state. … Marriage is a relationship between women and men, and so it will remain.”
Leading Polish pro-life activist Jacek Kotula, a councilor for the Karpackie region in the southeastern city of Rzeszów, told LifeSiteNews that Duda is sincere in his pro-family beliefs.
“Duda is a very religious man and will never sign a law for LGBT,” Kotula said.
“There is a fight going on for the future of the Polish people, for the souls of the young generation of Poles. President Duda supports, just like the majority of Poles, the traditional form of the family.”
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In contrast, Duda’s principal rival for the presidency, Warsaw’s Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski, 48, is known for promoting the LGBT agenda. As mayor, he has already introduced progressive sexual education in some Warsaw schools.
“Trzaskowski is the left wing of the centrist PO [Civic Platform] party,” journalist Krystian Kratiuk told LifeSiteNews.
“As the Mayor of Warsaw he has done a lot for the LGBT agenda, including signing the ‘LGBT Card’ that provided gay people with special hostels, entry to schools with their sex education, tolerance programs, and so on.”
Kratiuk said that the Family Card got its name as a form of opposition to Trzaskowski’s LGBT Card and that Duda’s PiS (Law and Justice) wants to polarize public opinion on the family issue.
“This is a clever and good move,” he added.
“The Family Card assumes financial social support for families, but also contains a declaration that marriage is always a relationship between a man and a woman only. This is also written in the Polish constitution, which every president of the country should guard.”
Kratiuk believes that Duda needs the support of social conservatives because there is “growing dissatisfaction” with people in power, thanks in part to the COVID-19 pandemic. But surveys show that he is doing better in the polls than LGBT activist Trzaskowski. The majority of Poles are not interested in what some politicians have called a “foreign ideology.”
“Of course, today the Left is raging, claiming that Duda has signed a ‘homophobic card,’” Kratiuk remarked.
“But nobody except the left wing in Poland cares about the [dog whistle] ‘homophobia’; certainly not the ‘undecided’ voters.”
Jacek Kotula told LifeSiteNews that most Poles wholeheartedly agree with Duda’s proposals and that Trzaskowski is supported in large cities where people are less religious.
But Duda still has to convince the pro-life voters disappointed by the ruling PiS party’s foot-dragging over the citizens’ bill banning eugenic abortion. Filip Mazurczak, a Polish-American translator and journalist living in Kraków, told LifeSiteNews that Duda is also being challenged from the opposite direction.
“Duda may be playing the social conservatism card now in order to get the voters of Krzysztof Bosak, or at least get Bosak to endorse him in the second round,” Mazurczak said.
“Bosak's been doing surprisingly well in the polls, most of which put him in fourth place.”
Bosak, 38, a traditional Catholic skeptical of the European Union’s leadership, represents the nationalist Ruch Naradowy (National Movement) party.
Marczurak agrees that the great majority of Poles are antithetical to the LGBT agenda, pointing to surveys that show that only 27.2% support same-sex “marriage.” Whereas 75.8% have no problem with civil partnerships for heterosexual couples, 50% oppose them for same-sex couples. In addition, 73.1% of Poles are against same-sex couples’ adopting children; only 16.7% support the practice.