Poland is in ‘dire need’ of addressing its policies on LGBTI people
National lawmakers in Poland have created a draft bill to parliament ban gay conversion therapy.
Politicians from the Nowoczesna party drafted the bill alongside Campaign Against Homophobia. Gay conversion or ‘ex-gay conversion’ therapy is a widely condemned process. It involves forcing LGBTI to undergo medical interventions, counselling or religious teachings in order to make them straight or cisgendered.
‘Forcefully persuading somebody that if they try hard enough, they will be able to change their sexual orientation is an act of violence,’ said Campaign Against Homophobia’s Miroslawa Makuchowska.
‘There’s a good reason for the fact that the United Nations call such pseudotherapies a torture. In Poland there is no law that would ban such quackery and it’s high time it was changed.’
The lawmakers and LGBTI advocates came together to create the bill after a 2018 European Parliament Report on the fundamental report on the rights of LGBTI people. In the same year the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities said Poland had ‘a dire need’ to address and ban conversion therapies.
The draft bill will ban using, offering the use of, promoting and advertising conversion practices. It will also prohibit promoting people or entities that offer, use, advertize or promote conversion pseudo therapy.
Nowoczesna MPs plan to introduce the bill to the Polish parliament in the next few months.
The draft bill comes only a few weeks after Poland’s first openly gay MP, Robert Biedron, announced a new progressive party called Wiosna.
‘There is no room for hate, we have reached the limit,’ he said at the party launch in Warsaw.
‘We need a spring that will renew this gloomy landscape.’
by Shannon Power
Source – Gay Star News
