LGBT ACTIVISM IN HUNGARY By Maria Kristófy & Dorottya Rédai
referendum valid. This is an enormous win, a great public support for LGBT+ causes and democracy. Of course, far-right groups were unhappy with this result, and two members of one of these groups submitted five different complaints to the National Election Commission (NEC), claiming it was unlawful to encourage people to vote invalid. The NEC accepted the complaints and fined the 16 organizations participating in the campaign, including Labrisz. The organizations appealed to the court and strangely, the five appeals to the five complaints were distributed among three different judge councils. Three of the councils found the NEC ruling unfounded and exempted the organisations but the other two councils didn’t. Therefore one of the 16 organizations, Háttér Society for LGBT People, got fined. Háttér has appealed to the Higher Court. In case of unfavourable ruling, the case will be taken further to the Constitutional Court, and if necessary, to the European Court of Justice. MORE AND MORE RAINBOW FAMILIES AND TRANS PEOPLE ARE PLANNING TO LEAVE THEIR HOMELAND “ After the elections many LGBT+ people are deeply disappointed. More and more rainbow families and trans people are planning to leave their homeland looking for a safe, inclusive social environment in other countries. We, who remain here, expect that we will have to fight even more fiercely for our equality and rights in the coming years. We won’t give up. Unlike the opposition parties’ coalition, our coalition works, and we keep standing united.
printrun was printed. Alongside winning several awards for her work, Dorottya Rédai, the coordinator of the book project was nominated by Time Magazine to be one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021. Labrisz, in collaboration with the Network of Human Rights Educators (EJHA) is working on lesson plans for the tales and is training teachers working with primary school-aged children to use the tales in classes for discussing human rights issues. The English version of the book will be published by HarperCollins this October and will be available in Ireland and worldwide. We are working… Because of the “Child Protection Law” we cannot continue our LGBT school program for now, we are not receiving invitations from schools. However, the program lives on: we are putting more emphasis on teacher training, developing trainings for other school professionals (social workers, psychologists), and we have launched some activities addressing parents who have LGBT+ children or want to talk about LGBT+ issues with their children but don’t know how to do it. We have started to develop the website for the fairytale book with interactive quizzes. We are collaborating with other organisations on various projects dealing with sex education, anti-gender ideology and human rights education, and as usual, we are offering some programs for the Budapest Pride Month Festival. Labrisz is undergoing organisational restructuring and development, with the aim of being able to respond more professionally to the challenges raised by the antidemocratic political climate and by the growth of the organisation. We are planning to open a community place where LGBT+ people who wish to get involved in activism can come together and organize themselves. This year Labrisz co-hosts the European Lesbian* Conference in Budapest, which will bring hundreds of lesbian* activists from Europe and Central Asia together. Mark the date in your calendar: 29 September – 1 October, and keep checking for updates: https://europeanlesbianconference.org/. We are looking forward to seeing you there!
national elections to strengthen the legitimation of the “Child Protection Law” by the high number of people expected to vote at the elections. The referendum questions were about parental consent to provide information about sexuality issues and gender reassignment surgery in schools, about projecting media contents which supposedly influence children’s development without restriction for minors, and about promoting gender reassignment for minors in the media. The government urged people to say NO to all the questions. Before the governmental anti-LGBT campaign was launched Labrisz did not focus on politics but community building, educational and cultural activities. However, when the “Child Protection Law” was introduced, Labrisz joined other LGBT+ and human rights organizatons to campaign against it. This group of organisations formed a coalition at the start of the election campaign period and launched the campaign “Invalid answers for invalid questions”. The aim was to reach enough invalid ballots for invalidating the referendum. If the referendum had been valid, it would have given popular legitimation to the homo- and transphobic “Child Protection Law”. For the national elections the opposition parties united into one coalition, therefore one opposition candidate ran against the Fidesz candidate in every voting district. We hoped this strategy would bring success to the opposition but it didn’t work out. Fidesz won a landslide two thirds victory, and 6 representatives from the far-right party Mi Hazánk (Our Homeland) were also elected to be MPs. The opposition coalition received less votes than at the previous election in 2018 when the parties ran separately. However, our referendum campaign was hugely successful! 1.7 million citizens cast invalid votes, so the valid referendum ballots did not reach the number required to make the
The political situation In the past few years, the political situation of the Hungarian LGBT+ community has significantly worsened. In June 2021 the Hungarian Parliament adopted an amendment to the Child Protection Law. Originally the amendment aimed to strengthen legal tools to combat paedophilia (a term the government likes to use for child sexual abuse), but the ruling party (Fidesz) inserted new sections on ‘LGBT propaganda’ before voting. The law prohibits ‘portraying’ or ‘propagating’ homosexuality and gender transition in education and the media for minors and excludes comprehensive sex education programs from schools. As the government argues, sex education is parents’ exclusive duty, and only state-registered and -approved organisations can visit schools to provide sex education. However, up to now, there has been no possibility for organisations to register. Teachers and social workers at schools are not allowed to speak of sexual orientations other than heterosexuality, even if children ask questions about it or ask for help. Ironically, over 14 it is legal to have sex with another minor in Hungary, regardless of the gender of the partner, but it is forbidden for them to speak about sex in school. This can cause severe physical and psychological problems at school where LGBT+ children are often bullied and need help from adults. The suicide rate of teenagers in Hungary is rather high, and that of LGBT+ teenagers is about 15% higher. In the political campaign for the national elections in April 2022, Fidesz, used hate-mongering and moral panic to deliver their campaign messages positioning the LGBT+ community as ‘the enemy’ from which only they can protect Hungarian people, and especially children. Manipulative messages poured from the media, most of which is owned or influenced by Fidesz. They organized a referendum on the day of the
The fairytale book story continues…
Since publishing the book ‘A Fairytale for Everyone’, Labrisz has received great international attention. Since October 2021 the book has been published in Dutch, Polish, Slovak, German and Swedish. By the end of 2022 it will come out in English, French, Czech, Finnish and Estonian, and we are negotiating with potential publishers in other languages. In Hungarian 33,000 copies have been sold. In Germany, a week after the release of the first printrun of 15,000 copies, a second
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