2 January, 2010

The Tories' right-wing allies in Europe, the Polish Law & Justice party, have once again claimed gays are linked to paedophilia and are calling for a gay websites to be monitored by the government.

MPs from the Law & Justice party have used a parliamentary question to call for a special team to be set up at the Ministry of the Interior and Administration, according to reports from the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita.

Polish MP Stanislaw Pieta told the paper “the team would monitor homosexual websites because we are dealing with the promotion of the so called ‘positive paedophilia’ by some homosexual circles.” Pieta went on to claim spurious statistice that in the UK up to 43% of cases of paedophilia involved gay people - but that gay people only made up 1% of the population.

The Law & Justice Party are in coalition with the British Conservatives in the European Parliament. The leader of this coalition, Law & Justice MEP Michal Kaminski, was invited to speak at the Conservative Party conference in 2009.

In October 2009, Tory leader David Cameron said "I don't believe the Law and Justice Party are homophobic".

LGBT Labour co-chair Katie Hanson said:

"Once again, David Cameron's allies in Europe have shown themselves to be deeply anti-gay. Surely Cameron can't still believe his allies are anything but homophobic - and yet he is refusing to distance himself from them. We are very concerned that the Conservatives are prepared to tolerate and accept this prejudice - it shows the Tories cannot be trusted when it comes to equality."