Krasnik voted to be “free of L.G.B.T.” two years ago to satisfy conservative voters. Now, the mayor regrets the move, which has led to censure from other European countries and put funding at risk.hen local councilors adopted a resolution two years ago declaring their small town in southeastern Poland “free of L.G.B.T.,” the mayor didn’t see much harm in what appeared to be a symbolic and legally pointless gesture. Today, he’s scrambling to contain the damage. What initially seemed a cost-free sop to conservatives in the rural and religiously devout Polish borderlands next to Ukraine, the May 2019 decision has become a costly embarrassment for the town of Krasnik. It has jeopardized millions of dollars in foreign funding and, Mayor Wojciech Wilk said, turned “our town into a synonym for homophobia,” which he insisted was not accurate. A French town last year severed a partnership with Krasnik in protest. And Norway, from which the mayor had hoped to get nearly $10 million starting this year to finance development projects, said in September that it would not give grants to any Polish town that declares itself “free of L.G.B.T.”
“We have become Europe’s laughingstock, and it’s the citizens not the local politicians who’ve suffered most,” lamented Mr. Wilk, who is now lobbying councilors to repeal the resolution that put the town’s 32,000 residents in the middle of a raucous debate over traditional and modern values. The situation also illustrates the real-life consequences of political posturing in the trenches of Europe’s culture wars. When Krasnik declared itself “free of L.G.B.T.,” it was joining dozens of other towns in the region that had adopted similar measures with strong support from Poland’s governing right-wing Law and Justice party and the Roman Catholic Church. (…) In response to a rash of anti-L.G.B.T. resolutions across Poland’s heartland, the European Union, of which Poland is a member, as well as Norway and Iceland, have said they will cut funding to any Polish town that violates Europe’s commitment to tolerance and equality. The European Parliament also passed a resolution last month declaring all 27 countries in the bloc an L.G.B.T. “Freedom Zone,” although like the Polish resolutions declaring the opposite, the declaration has no legal force. All the posturing, however, has begun to have concrete consequences. Krasnik’s mayor said he worried that unless his town’s “free of L.G.B.T.” status is rescinded, he has little chance of securing foreign funds to finance electric buses and youth programs, which he said are particularly important because young people keep leaving.
via nytimes: After Going ‘Free of L.G.B.T.,’ a Polish Town Pays a Price
