One of the top aides to Czech President Václav Klaus has launched an attack on fellow right-wing politicians for lending their support to Prague’s first gay and lesbian parade and festival.
The deputy head of the Presidential Office, Petr Hájek, included top Civic Democrat (ODS) figure and Prague member of the lower house of Parliament Boris Šťastný in his wider attack on the event due to be staged next week.
“This is a serious political demonstration of certain worldwide value visions. There are visions where the classical family plays no role, where deep rooted national and cultural traditions collide with multiculturalism. It’s a world where sexual or any other type of deviance is raised into a virtue, abnormality as the norm and the destruction of society as sacred progress,” Hájek wrote on the website ParlamentníListy.cz.
‘It’s a world where sexual or any other type of deviance is raised into a virtue, abnormality as the norm and the destruction of society as sacred progress.’
Hájek added that some members of the right of center ODS, including Šťastný, seemed to have chosen membership of the wrong party and would have been better adviser to transfer elsewhere.
Prague’s ODS Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda said City Hall was not giving any financial support to the gay parade and festival but he had lent his name to back it, as he did many other events and occasions.
“Prague Pride is one of dozens of actions that have been backed in this way,” Svoboda said. He added that party colleagues had the right to have reservations about such support but that the ODS party had always declared itself to be “a liberal conservative party which protects the principles of an open society.”
Hájek previously hit the headlines in May when he suggested that Osama Bin Laden’s death and life were nothing but “a media fiction.” He had earlier suggested in a book released in 2009 that the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US were possibly organized by US secret services themselves — and certainly did not take place as represented by the US government and the world media.
The five-day Festival of Tolerance or Prague Pride 2011 is taking place from August 10-14. Previous events in other Czech cities have often been disrupted by right-wing extremists.
