Ahead of a tight run-off race Sunday, the president of Poland has announced plans to change the country’s constitution to ban adoption of children by same-sex couples.
On Monday, Andrzej Duda said he would submit legislation of the constitutional amendment, hoping to gain support from the opposition centrist Civic Platform, according to Reuters.
“I am convinced that, thanks to this, children’s safety and concern for the good of children will be ensured to a much greater extent,” the 48-year-old incumbent president said at an event in Warsaw.
“The Polish constitution should explicitly state that the adoption of a child by a person in a same-sex relationship is excluded,” Duda told supporters, according to Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
“On Monday I will sign a presidential draft amendment to the constitution [to that effect],” he added.
Duda is backed by the ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, a socially conservative party that dismisses LGBTQ rights as a foreign influence designed to destroy Poland’s traditional values.
Last month he told supporters that he’d ban the teaching of LGBTQ issues in schools, signing a declaration aimed at “protecting children from LGBT ideology.”
He also said that LGBTQ “ideology” is worse than communism.
According to Polish news site Notes from Poland, last week Duda said he would “never allow children to be adopted by same-sex couples, because this is experimentation on children…This is enslavement of a child.”
Warsaw mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, Duda’s rival in next week’s run-off election, has angered some conservative voters in the past, after introducing LGBTQ education in the city’s schools. But over the weekend Trzaskowski said that he “agrees with the president in this matter.”
Polish radio station RMF 24 reported that Trzaskowski said he is “against the adoption of children by same-sex couples, and it seems to me that this is the position of most political parties.”
In Poland, a two-thirds majority vote in the lower house of parliament, as well as an absolute majority of votes in the upper-house Senate, is necessary to amend the constitution.
