Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/08/poland-thousands-march-agains.html
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Wonder how awesome this place could be if we all worked together.
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In response to protests, Polish far right politician Janusz Korwin-Mikke, one of the leaders of Confederation coalition, has stated that chrisitans are obliged to call for stoning of homosexual people (he used homophobic slur). It’s disgusting, and clearly a hate speech, theoretically illegal under Polish law but I doubt it will be prosecuted. I’m glad I’m not christian anymore.
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At first< I thought the headline read “Portland” instead of “Poland.” The issues are universal. The protests are the same, across the world, People who have been used and abused are standing up, and saying, “NO MORE.”
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There’s also huge pro-democratic, women rights movement in Belaurs right now. It’s led by Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya:
I really hope they succeed, their country has suffered far too long under current regime.
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I was hearing about the latest in Belarus earlier tonight. I hope they succeed in their struggle, too.
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Which, in Poland, pretty much means Catholics. The Catholic church in Poland is openly on these guys’ side and helps to get a lot of the vote out in rural areas where it still holds more sway than in the cities. (But even there it is pretty influential.)
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Here’s to the protesters’ success, and to the eventual end of this hatemongering right-wing populist regime. [a statement sadly applicable to many countries these days]
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The Orthodox church in Poland also doesn’t seem LGBT-friendly. I’m not sure about various protestant churches though, maybe some are more tolerant.
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Oh, none of them are LGBT-friendly. But in Poland it’s the Catholics that are the leaders - nearly 93% of the population identify as Catholic, allegedly (from Wikipedia):
Poland is one of the most religious countries in Europe.[2] Though varied religious communities exist in Poland, most Poles adhere to Christianity. Within this, the largest grouping is the Roman Catholic Church: 92.9% of the population identified themselves with that denomination in 2015 (census conducted by the Central Statistical Office (GUS));[1][3] according to the Institute for Catholic Church Statistics, 36.7% of Polish Catholic believers attended Sunday Mass in 2015.[4] Poland is one of the most catholic countries in the world, Neal Pease describes Poland as “Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter.”[5]
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My perception may be skewed, because I come from a multicultural part of the country near Belarus and Lithuanian border. Large part of population there is Orthodox, and there is also Muslim community. Many of my parents’ neighbours are Tatars.
Having said that, Polish far right identifies nearly exclusively with Catholicism. A work colleague who had disturbingly far right worldview converted to Lutheranism, and quickly found himself rejected and hated by his far right friends. It was entertaining to see his disappointment.
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Understood. May be worth reading the whole Wiki article but this explains more…
The Orthodox are outnumbered approx 130 to 1
The rest of the population consists mainly of Eastern Orthodox (Polish Orthodox Church) (507,196 believers, Polish and Belarusian),[13] various Protestant churches (the largest of which is the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession in Poland, with 61,217 members)[13] and Jehovah’s Witnesses (116,935).[13] There are about 55,000 Greek Catholics in Poland.[13] Other religions practiced in Poland, by less than 0.1% of the population, include Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.[14]
According to 2015 statistics assembled by Statistics Poland, 94.2% of the population is affiliated with a religion; 3.1% do not belong to any religion. The most practiced religion was Roman Catholicism, whose followers comprised the 92.8% of the population, followed by the Eastern Orthodox with 0.7% (rising from 0.4% in 2011, caused in part by recent immigration from the Ukraine), Jehovah’s Witnesses with 0.3%, and various Protestant denominations comprising 0.2% of the Polish population and 0.1 of Greek Catholic Churches.[1]According to the same survey, 61.1% of the population gave religion high to very high importance whilst 13.8% regarded religion as of little or no importance. The percentage of believers is higher in Eastern Poland.
ETA and they’d be even more outnumbered if it weren’t for a recent influx from Ukraine
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