Warsaw Pride to Go Ahead Despite Right Wing Death Threats

According to The New York Times, Warsaw, Poland’s Pride parade will go as scheduled tomorrow despite threats of violence.

The Law and Justice leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, recently called the gay rights movement a foreign import that threatens the nation’s identity. In conservative areas, town councils have been declaring their municipalities “L.G.B.T. free.”

On the eve of the parade, a far-right journalist on public television, Rafal Ziemkiewicz, sent chills down the spines of the L.G.B.T. community with a Twitter post. “One must shoot at L.G.B.T.” people he wrote, before adding, “Not in the literal sense of course — but these are not people of good will or defenders of anybody’s rights, (the movement is) a new mutation of Bolsheviks and Nazis.”

LGBT rights became a topic of public debate this year when Mr. Trzaskowski, the Warsaw mayor, who is from the centrist opposition party Civic Platform, issued a rights declaration setting out the city’s commitment to try to help find shelter for gay youths rejected by their parents.

Poland’s education minister, claimed it was an attempt to groom children “for pedophiles and said that sex education was the responsibility of families only.”

Warsaw’s Pride parade is the largest in central and Eastern Europe is expected to bring thousands of people to the streets of Poland’s capital city.