A Constitution for Cefizelj

“Hands off our children!” one of our political grandees recently exclaimed on social media, backing up his digital fist on the table with the accusation that someone was, with something, directly violating Article 54 of the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia.

The Constitution is an important thing, and violations of it are no laughing matter. For those of you who don’t know it by heart, Article 54 concerns the rights and duties of parents regarding the maintenance, education and upbringing of their children. Interfering with rights regarding the upbringing of children is a sensitive matter, whether it is the mother-in-law or the state looking over parents’ shoulders, let alone anyone else. Since this time the concern was expressed by someone who holds very pronounced views when it comes to children, I was of course curious to know who was threatening our children and how. There is no doubt that the gentleman knows a great deal about defending and protecting the people against social threats, since he was my former high school teacher of general people’s defense and social self-protection. And mentor of the defense club.

This time he was enraged by a handbook entitled A Rainbow in Your Pocket, published almost four years ago, as part of a strategic partnership under the EU’s Erasmus+ program, by Legebitra, a civil society organization working in the fields of human rights, education, and mental, physical and sexual health, which campaigns for social and systemic changes based on respect for sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Since I know that my former comrade teacher these days can hardly bear a rainbow in the sky, let alone a rainbow on a flag and evidently even less a rainbow in a pocket, the only surprising thing is that he waited so long for his outburst of indignation. The weekly Demokracija showed greater vigilance, warning parents soon after the handbook came out that their “children will be indoctrinated and turned into homosexuals.”

Four years later, in a booster dose of vigilance, we now learn that behind the indoctrination turning our children into homosexuals lies LGBTQI+ ideology. This, as the message posted on social media warns, “with strong political support is increasingly present in Slovenian schools and kindergartens. LGBTQIA+ organizations are investing a lot of money and time in recruiting and training teachers in order to indoctrinate children in kindergartens and schools with LGBTQIA+ ideology.” So now you know. Thank God there are still people among us whose attention never flags on these matters. If you wanted to set up a club for the defense of children against LGBTQIA+ ideology, you would be hard pressed to find a better mentor.

For the uninitiated, the doctrine of the existence of LGBTQIA+ ideology is based on the thesis that people who belong to sexual minorities do, in principle and in theory, have the right to equality and respect for their human dignity, but only until those rights begin to be publicly advocated, their respect demanded and put into practice. At that moment the rights of members of these social minorities are no longer rights but become an ideology and a conspiracy theory against which we may and must defend ourselves with everything that comes to hand and mind.

We can learn from others here. I am writing this column on the way back from Vilnius in Lithuania, where I met human rights activists from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Among them were LGBTQI+ ideologues from the Russian Federation, who complained about a recent ruling of the Russian Supreme Court that effectively criminalized any activity by organizations defending the rights of sexual minorities in that country. Now they can no longer spread their theories even in theory without risking ending up in jail. In Putin’s Russia, not only children but adults too are safe from LGBTQI+ ideology. Even the best mentors have role models.

In Slovenia we are still trailing behind Russia for now, but some are putting a lot of effort into catching up. Curiosity gave me no peace, so I sat down to read and find out how A Rainbow in Your Pocket threatens our children. It turned out to be a handbook intended to deepen school staff’s professional knowledge and skills in dealing with peer violence, bullying, name-calling, prejudice and stereotypes based on students’ personal circumstances.

To the casual reader it may not be immediately clear how such activity could violate any article of the Constitution, including the rights and duties of parents. I admit that at first I was a little confused about this myself. Perhaps the critics believe that the incidence of such forms of peer violence does not reach the threshold that would justify interfering with parents’ right to bring up their children in the spirit of bullying, name-calling, prejudice and stereotypes based on students’ personal circumstances? A survey published in the handbook showed that in 2003 a mere 54 percent of respondents in Slovenia had been exposed to violence at school because of their same-sex orientation. By 2014 the share of those who answered that they had been discriminated against or harassed during their schooling had fallen to a negligible 30 percent. With such low numbers, it really wouldn’t do to make a rainbow elephant out of a fly. Hands off our children and their hands, with which they mistreat their classmates! I would add that for just under a fifth of them it was not peer violence at all; they were harassed and discriminated against by teachers. Hands off our teachers!

Some may also wonder how such an interpretation of Article 54 of the Constitution can be reconciled with its Article 14, which states that in Slovenia “everyone shall be guaranteed equal human rights and fundamental freedoms irrespective of national origin, race, sex, language, religion, political or other conviction, material standing, birth, education, social status, disability or any other personal circumstance.” Readers more sensitive to traditional values will certainly recall the recent position of a constitutional judge who, in a dissenting opinion on the decision by which the Constitutional Court rejected the request for a referendum on amending the Family Code, warned of a violation of “the right to separate oneself from others.” The constitutional judge lamented that we do not allow “an empowered individual who thinks and acts independently of what the majority thinks” to have more rights than someone else. He stressed that the “right to separation” is “the second pillar of our tradition.” To a certain extent that is true. The legal order of Butale also knew a right to separation, at least as regards crime statistics. Let us recall the terrible robber Cefizelj, who smothered seven people and three women.

A ruder and more superficial chronicler than I am might, at these reflections, recall the indignation of the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, who in a speech in June 1935 sharply condemned all those “who shamelessly declare that Jews are people too.” When, a few days later, the main Jewish newspaper Jüdische Rundschau dared to object to the separation into people and Jews on which the German legal order of the time was based, the minister banned it without hesitation. I myself believe that such a comparison between the historical events described and today’s reflections on separation would be exaggerated and misleading. In the first case it was the persecution of certain social groups on the basis of their personal circumstances; in the second, merely protection against the personal circumstances of certain social groups.

Even Cefizelj would get that these are two completely different things.