28th Budapest Pride event ends
July 18th, 2023The annual Pride March is followed by controversy over the ’Child Protection Law’.
The 28th Budapest Pride Parade was attended by tens of thousands of people in central Budapest on Saturday, including ambassadors of several dozen countries. At a garden party at his residence after the march, US ambassador David Pressman criticised the child protection law which bans ‘wanton representation of sexuality’ to children and in the vicinity of places of culture. The law is described by the opposition as an anti-LGBT regulation. The government’s Information Centre released a statement saying that adults’ private life is a private matter but ‘children must be protected’.
Népszava devotes two comments to the matter in a single issue. Dániel Juhász writes that by now, the Pride Parade is only opposed by a small group of far-right sympathisers. He invites them to try love instead of hate and find out the difference. Mária Gál dismisses as unacceptable the criticism levelled by Tamás Menczer, state secretary at the Foreign Ministry to the 35 ambassadors in Budapest who, in a statement of support to the Pride March, criticised the ‘child protection act’. The ambassadors only took up the defence of human rights, she writes.
In Magyar Nemzet, László Szőcs believes authorising same sex marriage as demanded by Pride participants would be an unpopular move in Hungary, as a survey suggests it is opposed by 61 percent of the population. All persecution of homosexuals was abolished in Hungary in 1961, he remarks, and assures his readers that same sex marriage will not be legalised until it enjoys majority support within the population.