Minister Judit Varga, a member of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz-KDNP Party Alliance — which equalled Germany’s recently retired Angela Merkel by winning its fourth national election in a row this April — was speaking to Breitbart London on the subject of her government’s recent moves to prohibit LGBT content targeted at children in schools and some forms of media, which has drawn the ire of the European Union and the international left.
“In recent years, a new trend emerged in Western Europe what I could simply call the gender madness,” she said, saying that Germany, in particular, was a textbook example of “what happens when the liberal advocates for multiculturalism and gender politics come to power”.
There, she said, the so-called ‘traffic light’ coalition government of the left-wing Social Democratic Party, far-left Greens, and liberal Free Democratic Party “devoted a separate sub-chapter to Queer policy” in its manifesto, adding that this “included, inter alia, the encouragement of the LGBTQ lobby in schools or the funding of the full cost of sex reassignment surgeries from taxpayers’ money.”
“We said ‘enough’ since we believe that there can be no sexual education without the consent of parents,” Varga insisted — but conceded that “left-liberal politicians in Brussels” — the EU’s chief power centre — “don’t like that as it doesn’t fit in their mainstream agenda.”
Indeed, the European Union — notionally a mere “trade club” for facilitating the free movement of goods, services, capital, and labour under a common set of rules — has vowed to punish Hungary for the legislation, arguing that the Central European country “has failed to explain why the exposure of children to LGBTIQ content as such would be detrimental to their well-being or not in line with the best interests of the child” — as if such exposure should be the default unless Brussels can be persuaded otherwise.
“They were shouting discrimination and claimed that the Hungarian people do not [support the proposals],” Varga said, explaining that this was the reason her government organised a national referendum on them to coincide with the April elections.
The specific questions put to Hungarian voters, translated to English, were as follows:
Do you support holding information events on sexual orientation to minors, in public education institutions without parental consent?
Do you support the promotion of gender reassignment treatments to minors?
Do you support the unrestricted exposure of minors to sexually explicit media content, that may influence their development?
Do you support showing minors media content on gender changing procedures?
“Let the people speak then – we said. And they did: never before have so many people voted in the same way in a referendum in Hungary since the 1990s as on 3 April,” Varga said.
“Almost 3 million people sent the message: Hungarian parents have the exclusive right to educate their children/leave our children alone… we have never signed any international convention or treaty that would transfer the power of raising children to anyone other than Hungarian parents. ”
Technically, Hungarian referendums are not legally binding if at least 50 per cent of the electorate do not cast a valid ballot, and the LGBT content referendum fell below this threshold because the laws’ opponents — perhaps not believing they could win fair and square — organised mass ballot spoiling.
This meant that, despite a turnout of 69.44 per cent, only 45.25 per cent of the electorate officially cast a valid ballot — but Minister Varga’s comments to Breitbart London suggest that the Hungarian government believes it has a democratic mandate to press on with its policy despite these spoiler tactics.
Sixteen so-called civil society NGOs accused of encouraging the sabotage of the referendum, including Amnesty International, were given small fines by Hungary’s National Election Committee in the wake of the vote.
(The story was published on breitbart.com and has been reproduced here.)
