Rémy Bonny: The machine behind the “anti-gender” ideology
By Rémy Bonny
The anti-LGBTIQ+ movement became stronger and better organised in recent years. We, lgbti+ activists, did not care much about this at first. We thought things were getting better and better and did not see this counter-movement enough as a threat. We could not have been more wrong.
In 2019, Giorgia Meloni and then Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini welcomed the World Congress of Families in Verona. It is the annual highlight for the ultra-Christian anti-women and anti-lgbti+ movement. At that time, for the first time in more than a decade, the congress was once again hosted in a Western European country.
I headed to Verona as a young lgbti+ activist. My plan? Get in, undercover, at the congress. I had registered as a journalist, since I was on that moment writing a paper on the anti-LGBTIQ+ movement.
Unfortunately, my plan failed. When I arrived at the press desk, I was told that there was no room for "people like you" at the congress. I did not feel like making a drama, so I decided to conduct interviews with visitors on the pavement in front of the congress hall.
At one point, the president of the World Congress of Families came out. I spoke to Brian S. Brown and asked him some questions. At that moment, he invited me to continue the interview inside. Yep, the president ignorantly took me inside.
But after barely five minutes, the security guards had already noticed me. They grabbed me by the collar and forcibly threw me out of the building. Once again, it was abundantly clear that I was persona non grata there.
International network
So what did they have to hide, I wondered. The list of speakers captured the imagination by all means. Apart from Salvini and Meloni, it included: the then Hungarian state secretary for family affairs and current president Katalin Novak, the president of Moldova Igor Dodin and several senior representatives of the Vatican and various Orthodox churches.
Earlier, I suspect they wanted to keep the congress participants hidden. Today, I know that the congress has members with questionable backgrounds.
Take for instance Alexey Komov, the Russian representative of the World Congress of Families. Who is also the personal assistant to Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian-monarchist ultra-conservative oligarch who is on EU and US sanctions lists. Malofeev was also one of the main financiers of pro-Russian rebels in the Donbas since 2014. He was also one of the attendees at the 2014 World Congress of Families, which was even organised in the Kremlin at the time.
Another notable attendee in 2019 was Fabrice Sorlin, who served as the French representative. Sorlin was active in the alt-right group Dies Iræ. The US civil rights organisation Southern Poverty Law Center classifies that group as a "brutal Catholic militia [...], whose mission was to prepare white French Catholic youth for civil war against immigrants, blacks and Muslims".
Sorlin additionally played a key role in the loan Marine Le Pen received from the Kremlin for her election campaign. Those links came about through the World Congress of Families. A regional conference of the congress was held in Paris in 2017, organised by Sorlin and Komov. Georgian oligarch Levan Vasadze was one name on the list of speakers. In 2019, he sent out "squads" in Tbilisi to "hunt down homosexuals". Another name was John Laughland, MEP for the Dutch populist party Forum Voor Democratie, which also has ties to Russia. It is a mishmash of far-right figures and politicians trying to infiltrate in mainstream environments.
In 2018, Sorlin also joined the yellow vests in Paris. Photos from the protests show him carrying the flag of the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR), the self-proclaimed independent pro-Russian rebel province in Ukraine. He defends the DNR's interests and visited the region several times. He can thus be considered the DNR's "unofficial" representative in France.
Other usual suspects actively participating in the congress are organisations like Tradition, Family & Property (TFP) and the Polish ultra-conservative legal think tank Ordo Iuris. The latter is the organisation behind the ‘LGBTIQ+-free zones’ in Poland and the constitutional ban on abortion. Since legal reforms were introduced in Poland, their founder has become a Supreme Court judge. Several members occupy senior advisory positions within Polish ministries.
TFP, originally a Brazilian sect, is a widespread international ultra-Catholic network and one of the major funders of Ordo Iuris.
The involvement of such figures and organisations shows that apart from religious arguments, other motives come into play. The struggle against LGBTIQ+ communities is also a geopolitical struggle against human rights, and democracy in general. It also shows that the anti-LGBTIQ+ figures try to misuse sincere social movements for their own dark thinking. People like me are dismissed by them as the “destruction of the world’s oldest traditions”.
Access to power
No longer working on the margins, these organisations appropriated more and more political power. They found their way to the highest echelons of the political world.
Hungary, led by Katalin Novak, took the lead in the fight against LGBTIQ+ rights in recent years. She worked at several cabinets and became state secretary for family affairs in 2014. Gradually, she climbed to the top of Hungarian politics. As vice-president of Orban's Fidesz party, she was responsible for negotiations within the European People's Party (EPP).
Earlier this year, Novak was elected Hungarian president by the Hungarian parliament. But in fact, the Orban regime crowned her, given Orban's two-thirds majority in parliament. He owes this to unfair elections, as observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) found.
The World Congress of Families took place in Budapest in 2017, organised by Novak. Since then, she has chaired the Political Network for Values, a network of politicians working against LGBTIQ+ rights.
In 2020, she initiated the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women's Health and Strengthening the Family. The document, signed by 34 countries, was meant to lead to an international treaty that would ban same-sex marriage and abortion. The Trump and Bolsonaro administrations, among others, have actively supported its promotion.
Via Twitter, I pointed out to her that through the World Congress of Families, among others, she did have an awful lot of contact with dubious Russian figures. The only response she could muster was that I am accusing her falsely. 'It is unacceptable to spread lies about someone. It is even worse that they come from someone who considers himself a human rights defender.'
It is the only answer I ever got from her. I asked her several times to explain more about her connections to the anti-LGBTIQ+ movement and Russia, but got no response. I then framed her angry tweet and hung it with some pride in my office.
What is abundantly clear: the anti-LGBTIQ+ movement is a widespread spiderweb of hierarchically highly organised organisations. From within the LGBTIQ+ movement, we had a sense that things were getting better and better over the past decades.
But as the anti-movement has started to cling more and more to very influential policymakers and organise itself more and more strongly, there is again reason for great concern. The anti-movement forms a link between the far right, the Vatican, ultra-Christian churches and Russian intelligence agents.
As activists, opposition to LGBTIQ+ rights has for too long been dismissed as ‘marginal opposition’. Today it is stronger than ever with more resources than ever before. As liberals, it is therefore crucial to once again join hands and fight against it. We are on the right side of history, so let us go and defend it.
