It seems there is no end to the lengths that Lithuanian politicians will go to prove their intolerance. Their idiocy and hypocrisy is mind-boggling.
In the latest incident, Social Affairs Minister Rimantas Dagys has turned his withering glare to an EU sponsored program that is meant to help improve the teaching of tolerance in schools.
The program caused such controversy that the legislature pushed for a new law that would ban open displays of homosexuality.
The law would place such displays alongside similar portrayals those of physical violence or mutilated bodies. Ironically enough, the clause was put into a law that simultaneously bans discrimination based on sexual preference.
The main point of contention surrounded telling fairy tales in schools in which the main thrust of the story featured two princesses, or two princes, falling in love and living happily ever after.
If this law would ban telling fairy tales about a beautiful love between two women, should it not also cover some of the at times horribly violent traditional tales that most parents see no problem with?
If a fairy tale about two women falling in love would violate this law and block schools from fulfilling the program, then so should the tale of Kalevipoeg 's a mythical giant who would hurl rocks and decapitate his enemies with large planks. He is ultimately killed when his legs are hacked off by his own sword: a scene that would certainly violate the section of the law that covers mutilated bodies, if that law were to apply to fairy tales.
And yet, many in Lithuania would still prefer to allow their children to be exposed to this instead of a harmless love story that happens to involve two people of the same gender.
But the issue now goes far beyond the banning of a few fairy tales or some lessons about tolerance taught in schools.
Dagys even went so far as to attack any psychologists that refused to denounce the program, saying that an investigation should be opened into whether they work with children. Presumably, if they did work with children then the minister would push for them to lose their jobs.
Once the government considers crossing the line and beginning firing scientists for the academic views they hold, things have gone too far. It has gotten to the point that the EU needs to step in and not only protect its own program, but lambaste the minister and the government as a whole for allowing their intolerance and hatred to take the upper hand, and for considering amending a law banning discrimination such that the law itself is discriminatory.
