Not with Their Children
Hungarians Ban LGBT Indoctrination, Defying the EU
In June 2021, the Hungarian Parliament passed what has been described as "sweeping legislation" aimed against industries and media that support and enable pedophilia. Among other things, the law explicitly bans content aimed at school-age children that "depicts sexuality for its own sake" or that promotes or displays homosexuality or so-called gender re-assignment for those suffering from gender dysphoria.
The heavy lifting in drafting and passing the legislation was done by Prime Minister Victor Orbán's Fidesz (Faith) Party, and it passed with a super-majority vote, thanks to support from Fidesz's rival conservative party, Jobbik, and the Hungarian Christian Democratic Party (Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt).
The new law came almost seven months to the day after Hungary amended its constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman, bucking the general trend toward normalizing homosexual unions in the EU. That legislation was summarized in a press release from the Hungarian government as follows:
Hungary protects the institution of marriage as the association between a man and a woman and the family as the basis for the survival of the nation. The foundation of the family is marriage and the parent-child relationship. The mother is a woman; the father is a man.
Sound Legislation
The June legislation specifically prohibits the showing of pornographic material or content portraying transgenderism and homosexuality to anyone under the age of 18, specifically targeting such material when used in schools. In his statement defending the law, Orbán emphasized the latter point: "Education in schools must not be in conflict with the will of parents," he said. "It must at most be supplementary; its form and content must be clearly defined, and it must be subject to parental consent."
"Parents also rightly expect that on platforms used by our children, pornography, sexuality for its own sake, homosexuality, and gender reassignment programs should not be available," Orbán went on. "These restrictions must also be defined with surgical precision." At the same time, he explained that the law would not apply to those over 18, saying, "in our view, a free adult should not have to give an account of his life in front of any secular authority—only before God when the time comes."
The guiding ideas behind the legislation are clearly sound. The aim is not to prevent "free adults" from exercising their personal liberty or living out their "sexual identity," but to keep schools from becoming mechanisms for grooming children for abuse by adult homosexuals. That much is clear to rational, fair-minded, morally sane adults. To EU leftists, however, the legislation is a tyrannical law put into force by the "extreme right." Hence, it was—tiresomely and predictably—attacked by the usual LGBT-supporting suspects in media-land.
Orbán commented on that issue as well, saying that "the left is the enemy of freedom." "Instead of freedom of speech," he said, leftists "want political correctness as defined by them, and hegemony of opinion instead of a pluralism of ideas." Hungary, in contrast, aims to -preserve freedom. "The reasons for this are rooted in our cultural traditions, in Christian freedom, in the struggle for national freedom and in a deep con-tempt for communism and communist tyranny," Orbán said.
Feverish Press Reaction
John D. Martin was born and raised in Indiana, but now lives in Germany with his family. He earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois and has written both academic articles and articles for the popular press, including Touchstone, First Things, Salvo, and The Federalist. His first novel, Charis Colony: The Landing, appeared in November 2020.
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