Irish Examiner view: EU has to challenge Orban’s homophobia

Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, centre, talks to Bulgaria's President Rumen Radev, left, and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades during an EU summit at the European Council building in Brussels This week. Hungary's anti-LGBTI policies have come under attack from some EU leaders. Picture: Olivier Hoslet

The tension between diversity and solidarity can be the grit in the oyster that wears away common purpose. That unease can be managed or allowed to wreak its own kind of havoc. On Wednesday, European leaders in Brussels confronted a deepening, deliberate divergence from the core principles of tolerance, humanity, and individual rights and protections, when they challenged Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. 

Orbán’s government has introduced a law aimed at LGBTI people that is so offensive to EU values that the meeting heard unprecedented calls for Budapest to quit the community if it feels it necessary to reject its culture, values, and rules. Orbán’s legislation, purportedly about combatting paedophilia, bans the depiction of LGBT people and “gay propaganda” in media content prepared for children. Frustration with Hungary — and Poland — has been building because of Orbán’s dilution of democratic freedoms. This includes serial rejection of EU conclusions on human-rights issues. The conflict spilled into passionate confrontation when Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, asked Mr Orbán why Hungary did not leave the EU if it rejected its laws — blunt language rarely, if ever, heard at a European Council meeting.

Were Hungary, and maybe Poland, too, to take that retrograde step so soon after Brexit, and before the full impact of that divorce is known, the EU might seem diminished, but the determination to defend the ideals of tolerance and inclusion would, in fact, enhance it. The EU would survive far better without Hungary than Hungary would survive outside the EU. The Union should not be shy about confronting Hungary’s efforts to visit the old hatreds on some of its citizens. The irony that Orbán’s homophobia and nascent autocracy are confronted during the very month that Ireland issued a set of stamps celebrating our gay pride movement underlines his outlier status. We, and the EU, may have to do more than issue Bród stamps to wash this sand from the oyster.

That we also need to hold ourselves to higher standards, in a similar, if different, context, was underlined this week, when a First Nation in Canada’s Saskatchewan decided to treat a defunct residential school as a “crime scene”, following the discovery of 751 unmarked graves weeks after a similar discovery in British Columbia prompted a new review of the country’s colonial past. The parallels with our mother-and-baby homes scandals are all too obvious, yet we have no more than a discredited, incomplete report. The prospect of some of the burial sites, say at Tuam or Bessborough, being treated as “crime scenes” is as remote as Saskatchewan’s Marieval Indian residential school.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, indeed.

An astute politician, Mr Orbán would enjoy underlining this difference — just as he would, rightly, challenge us on our dysfunctional system of direct provision for asylum seekers and our minimal efforts to contribute to resolving the EU’s escalating immigration challenge.

The EU is obliged to challenge Hungary’s nastiness and that obligation should be welcomed if it forces us to also take an honest look in the mirror.