The Polish civil rights activist (Elzbieta Podlesna) who put up images of the Virgin Mary with a rainbow halo said she did so to protest against what she calls the "exclusion of LGBT people from society" by the country's Catholic Church.

...

"This is something that is unbelievable for me in the 21st Century in the centre of Europe," Ms Podlesna told the BBC.

"Nobody should be excluded from society. Sexual orientation is not a sin or a crime and the Holy Mother would protect such people from the Church and from priests who think it is okay to condemn others,"

...

She was... taken to Plock for questioning and was charged with offending religious feelings - a crime in Poland, punishable by up to two years in prison.

In a tweet, Poland's Interior Minister Joachim Brudzinski applauded the police's actions, writing: "All that nonsense about freedom and 'tolerance' does not give ANYONE the right to insult the feelings of the faithful".

Rainbow Europe brings together both the legal index of LGBTI equality based on our Rainbow Europe Map and an overview of the social climate for LGBTI people in each country based on our Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex People in Europe.

Rainbow Europe ranks all 49 European countries on a scale between 0% (gross violations of human rights, discrimination) and 100% (respect of human rights, full equality). We rank the countries on the basis of laws and policies that have a direct impact on the LGBTI people’s human rights in under 6 categories: equality and non-discrimination; family; hate crime and hate speech; legal gender recognition and bodily integrity; civil society space; and asylum.

surreptitious57 wrote:I am not really surprised with those rankings but was slightly disappointed to see Ireland quite low down
I also never know that there were 49 countries in Europe as geography was never my thing unfortunately

Hamster wrote:While freedom of, and even from, religion is enshrined in the Polish constitution it seems orthodoxy is ... expected and not to be trifled with.

You'd think the police'd have better things to do like locking up paedo priests.

Poland's government plans to jail paedophiles for longer after a powerful new documentary about abuse among priests went viral.

“Tell No One", by independent journalist Tomasz Sekielski, has been viewed more than 15 million times since it was posted to YouTube on Saturday.

The Law and Justice (PiS) government, which is closely allied with Poland's Catholic church, said parliament would debate the proposed changes within days.

The announcement came ahead of a tight race in elections to the European Parliament.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/15/pol ... goes-viral

rplatell wrote:Or perhaps Eurovision, which has extended the concept of Europe to include Israel, Morocco and even Australia.