Polish state TV host: Our anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric was shameful

A host on state-run Polish television has apologized for the homophobia that’s been broadcast for years.

“For many years in Poland shameful words have been directed at numerous individuals simply because they chose to decide for themselves who they are and whom they love,” TVP host Wojciech Szeląg said on a Sunday night broadcast, as translated by The Independent. “LGBT+ people are not an ideology but people, with specific names, faces, relatives, and friends.”

“All these people should hear the words ‘I am sorry’ exactly from this place,” added Szeląg, who was hosting two LGBTQ+ activists, Bart Staszewski and Maja Heban. “I am sorry.”

Poland has recently had a change in government, with the far-right, anti-LGBTQ+ Law and Justice party losing its majority in Parliament. There is now a governing coalition of liberal and centrist parties, and Donald Tusk, a moderate, has succeeded Mateusz Morawiecki as prime minister. Conservative Andrzej Duda remains president, but the president has less power than the prime minister.

Szeląg’s words were a repudiation of something Duda once said — that the LGBTQ+ movement was not people but an ideology. Under the Law and Justice government, many Polish leaders claimed LGBTQ+ people were a threat to the so-called traditional family, and some cities established what they dubbed “LGBT-free zones.”

Szeląg’s on-air apology “took me by surprise,” Staszewski said, according to The Independent. “I didn’t realize how much I needed” to hear it, he added, noting that it feels like Poland is having a “new beginning.”

Staszewski pointed out that there’s still much work to do in Poland, however. The nation still does not recognize same-sex unions, but the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that it must. LGBTQ+ advocates are also lobbying for a law against hate speech.