ROMANIAN CHURCH WANTS PRIDE WEEK PLAY BANNED

Marcel Gascón Barberá | June 13, 2019

The Romanian Orthodox Church said on Wednesday that the play, called ‘I am Too. So What?’, which has been staged during Pride Week in the Transylvanian city of Cluj, should be banned.

The church said in a statement that a law from 2006 that “forbids any form” of “religious defamation” or “public offence towards religious symbols”.

“Accordingly, we have pleaded for the law to be respected in its spirit and its letter,” the statement said.

It described the play as “an act of ideological anti-Christian propaganda”.

But the Cluj Pride Week organisers denied the play has any intention of denigrating Christianity and its values.

The show instead targets “religious extremists” and the “fake religiosity” that some use to attack the most “vulnerable”, the organisers said.

They also pointed out that the play has been performed before at other venues not associated with the gay community, without prompting any negative reactions.

This shows that the Church is just looking for an excuse to push its “extremist” agenda against gays, they added.

The Romanian Orthodox Church is known for its hostility towards homosexuality.

In 2018, it strongly supported a referendum to change the definition of marriage in the constitution.

The Romanian constitution defines marriage as the union of two spouses. The promoters of the referendum wanted this changed to a new formula that explicitly defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

But the bid to constitutionally block a potential legal recognition of same-sex marriages in the country failed, as the turnout didn’t reach the 30 per cent threshold set for the referendum to be deemed valid.

According to official statistics, more than 80 per cent of Romanians declare themselves Orthodox.