LGBT Legal rights Are Flashpoint in Culture War Dividing Europe’s East and West

TUCHÓW, Poland—Last 12 months, this smaller Polish town close to the japanese edge of the European Union handed a resolution proclaiming itself a “municipality cost-free of LGBT ideology.” In July, the EU responded by stripping funding for a system connecting Tuchów with a sister city in France.

For EU authorities, Tuchów had violated a essential right not to be discriminated against primarily based on sexual orientation or gender, some thing guarded in the bloc’s treaties and higher-court situation law. Some locals right here, in a stronghold of Poland’s freshly re-elected President Andrzej Duda, never see it that way.

“It is far more important for me and my colleagues, and probably for inhabitants, to act as guardians of our values, fairly than selling ourselves for the 30 pieces of silver,” explained Tuchów city councilor Mateusz Janiczek, a member of Poland’s conservative Regulation and Justice party, which backs Mr. Duda.

LGBT legal rights have become a flashpoint in a lifestyle war between Europe’s West, which is turning out to be broadly far more socially liberal, and its East, which hews to additional-conservative views. The social schism threatens EU unity and collective motion at a time of political and financial pressure.

Politicians in nations around the world of the East that had been guiding the Iron Curtain in the course of the Chilly War present themselves as defending traditions and Christian values. For quite a few in the West, that approach is at odds with fundamental tenets of Western liberal democracy.