What they really fear in Hungary

Disclaimer: this is a very raw and opinionated post, and I use very explicit language. If you don’t like to hear about LGBTQIA stuff, sexual education/orientation topics, or faint on the idea of a kid being taught about gender identities and sexual orientations, you may want to skip this post.

I was reading the news the other day (well, I try not to do that often 🙂 ) when I stumbled upon a CNN interview with Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó about the legislation to ban gender identity, sexual orientation, and any LGBTQIA education topics from schools.

I’m used to this kind of fake rhetoric of “We are not against gay rights, we are pro the right of fathers to decide”. It was similar in Spain a decade ago: “We are not against gay marriage, we are pro the traditional, real family”, as if gay and lesbian couples were going to organize raids to separate “traditional” families or kidnap their kids if they were allowed to get married (I will force him to divorce his wife and then he will be mine, muahuahuahuahua! – really?).

No, a gay guy will not marry a girl if he is not allowed to marry a guy and if (poor guy) for some reason he does it, that will only mean unhappiness and suffering for everybody in that family. You can’t force people against their nature, and that takes me to…

During the whole interview, Mr. Szijjártó is obviously uncomfortable, and becoming angrier and angrier with every question of the interviewer, until finally, at the end of the interview, he loses his cool and says the first non-sugared, real “reasoning” behind their homophobic law:

Me as a parent (sic), as a father, know my own child much better than any other NGO, or any other institution. That’s why, it’s much better for my children that I conduct their education regarding sexual orientation and not an NGO who (sic) knows nothing about my child. […] What we would like to avoid is that LGBTQIA activists go to kindergartens or go to schools and try to PROMOTE [emphasis mine] any kind of behavior or any kind of orientation to our children.

Péter Szijjártó – As clueless a parent as a legislator.

What seems to be the real cause of fear for the Hungarian government (but really isn’t)

Well, first, I want to tell you, Mr. Szijjártó, that you are wrong. If one of your kids is LGBTQIA, you have no f****g idea, and I know because, as a gay teenager with a (then) homophobic parent like you, I never said anything to my family. I became a stranger to my parents, and I withdrew into myself for a whole decade. When I finally came out, they were clueless (indeed, they thought I was going to tell them that I was going out with a girl who was my best friend back then).

But probably, that NGO has seen cases like your kid. They may know what he is going through. If he feels like he does not belong. If he is forcing himself to think of girls when jerking off. If he has suicidal thoughts because he thinks he is a monster. If he can’t even imagine letting his parents, family, and friends know… Just like me when I was 14, they will probably know how to help him. You have no idea. You don’t know him.

If your kid is cisgender (that’s what you call “normal”), no knowledge about gender diversity will “turn” him into anything else. Trust me.

Then, we get to the obvious (but misleading and superficial) cause of fear. You (and others like you) believe that NGOs go to schools and kindergartens, armed with all kinds of queer stuff (I don’t know, unicorn diadems and pink magic wands?) to TURN little boys into gays and little girls into lesbians (you know, like zombies or vampires when they bite you). You actually believe that if you teach a kid what being gay, queer, agender, or lesbian means, if you teach them that this is ok, and these people are to be respected like everybody else, they will transform into something queerish, as opposed to staying “normal”.

Well, I shouldn’t have to write this in 2021, but let me assure you, Mr. Szijjártó, that knowledge does not make you gay, lesbian, or anything. But knowledge has an important power, and that’s what you and your anachronic government really fear.

The real cause of fear behind that law: the fear of losing the power of fear

Knowledge has the power of dissolving fear. And that’s what you are scared of. You need fear. You need people to be illiterate and gullible.

You need them to believe that talking about being gay in front of their children will make them gays, or lesbians, or “god knows what else”. You need people with hateful, ignorant minds to gather to throw stones –like monkeys do when facing a scary predator– to people celebrating their right to love and be loved at the gay pride. You need parents to be scared that their children will become “this”, or will be “turned into that” by evil NGOs. You need people to refuse to believe that we are normal folks who laugh, cry, and fall in love like anybody else.

You can’t afford children to be educated about this, because it’s harder to hate something you don’t fear, and we fear what we don’t understand.

You know that the less they know, the less they see “the others” as equal to them, the more you can manipulate them and use this other group as a scapegoat. That thought is not new, it’s been used over and over again before.

And that’s the real fear in play here. Fear of knowledge. Because knowledge is power, and education is control.

“Microblogging pills” is an experiment: short posts containing random thoughts that cross my mind. Without necessarily any context or story behind, raw and unedited.