Polish soccer fans protested the decision by the far-left mayor of Warsaw to remove crucifixes from Warsaw’s city hall in the historically Catholic country.
In a match between Legia Warsaw and Zaglebie Lubin last Saturday, Legia Warsaw fans showed a banner that read “Trzaskowski, hands off the cross.” The sign was a protest against Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski’s decision to ban religious symbols in the city hall under the pretense of “equal treatment.”
A spokesperson for the mayor stated that Warsaw would be the first city to adopt the ban on religious symbols, i.e., crosses and crucifixes, in a public building. In the same document, the mayor also urged employees to use transgender “pronouns” and treat homosexual “couples” as if they were “married,” even though homosexual unions are not legally recognized in Poland.
Conservative politicians also expressed their criticism, and some took legal action against the ban. According to Euractiv, MP Malgorzata Gosiewska from the Law and Justice Party (PiS), the former governing party of Poland, submitted a request to the local administration to declare the mayor of Warsaw’s decree illegal.
PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński accused Trzaskowski’s party and its European group, the nominally “Christian democratic” European People’s Party (EPP), of trying to erase religion from people’s lives, as they seek “to destroy religion, destroy what people believe, that they are more than just homo sapiens, that they are human beings who have a soul, that they are human beings made in the image and likeness of God.”
The Catholic legal group and think tank Ordo Iuris filed a complaint accusing Trzaskowski of abusing his office. In an article published on its website, the organization said that Trzaskowski’s actions were based on an erroneous understanding of the Polish constitution.
“A cross hung on the wall of an office by citizens is first and foremost an expression of legally-protected religious freedom, including in the public sphere,” the Ordo Iuris article states. “The presence of the cross in offices is also part of the constitutional expression of gratitude ‘for the culture of the Nation, which is rooted in its Christian heritage as well as in universal human values’ (Constitution of the Republic of Poland, Preamble).”