The progressive mayor of Warsaw in Poland has drawn massive criticism for banning the display of religious symbols from all public buildings.

Rafał Trzaskowski, who was re-elected for a second term as mayor last month, passed the decree last week, in the name of preventing ‘discrimination’ and to “recognise and take into account social diversity.”

Given that Poland is an almost wholly Christian Catholic country, it basically means that no images of Christ or crosses are allowed at city hall and other state buildings.

In addition, all official events in the capital city must now be secular and not include any kind of prayer under the rule.

Trzaskowski, a deputy leader of the centrist Civic Platform (PO) party that forms the main part of Poland’s coalition government, is following the guidance of PO leader and now prime minister Donald Tusk who called for the removal of crosses from public buildings in 2021.

The mayor appears to be positioning himself for the role of president under Tusk.

Trzaskowski has claimed that “Poland is a secular state and Warsaw is its capital.”

Anyone who has been to Poland knows this is a complete inverse of reality. There are churches and Christian symbolism everywhere.

The mayor further stated that public buildings should be a “neutral place,” and asserted that “no one wants to combat any religion and that religious symbols will have their place when history is celebrated.”

The ruling also includes a provision to force state employees to ‘respect’ the preferred pronouns of people identifying as non-binary and transgender, a vast minority in Poland.

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The ruling states that it state employees are encouraged to take account of those “whose appearance may differ from stereotypical ideas related to gender recorded in official documents,” and, somewhat ironically, to “address him or her with the name or gender pronouns that he or she indicates.”

Opposition politician Tobiasz Bocheński has labelled the mayor “a fanatical leftist ideologue who is trying to introduce extreme leftist ideology to Warsaw, contrary to the legal order and customs prevailing in Poland.”

Jarosław Sellin, former deputy culture minister, further noted “These are the effects of electing extreme leftists to power. Trzaskowski formally is a deputy leader of a party that is part of a Christian Democratic movement, what an irony. I always have a cross on the desk in my office, which means that I could no longer work in Poland’s capital city.”

The move is so controversial in Poland given that religious symbols were previously banned under the communist regime of the Polish People’s Republic, and only restored at the end of the 1980s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe.

Opposition leader Jarosław Kaczyński has accused the Warsaw Mayor of “triggering a religious war,” further charging that Tusk’s party represents “a European option to destroy religion and faith”.

Source: Modernity