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Slovak Culture Minister Martina Šimkovičová blamed the LGBTQ+ minority for Europe’s declining fertility rates in a July 3 interview with Slovak tabloid Topky.sk.
“We heterosexuals are creating the future, because we make babies. Europe is dying out, babies are not being born because of the excessive number of LGBTQ+ [people]. And the strange thing is [that it’s happening] with the white race,” the minister said.
The Bratislava-based Human Rights Institute responded by filing a criminal complaint with the general prosecutor’s office against Šimkovičová on suspicion of racism and anti-Semitism, said the institute’s director, Peter Weisenbacher.
Homophobic speech is not outlawed in Slovakia, unlike racist and anti-Semitic comments.
“Support for racism and anti-Semitism has no place in Europe in 2024. We know where such tendencies have led in the past. We call on Minister Šimkovičová to resign immediately,” Weisenbacher said.
Slovakia was shaken by the murder of two gay men outside a gay bar in Bratislava in October 2022, but the rights of sexual minorities have come under further pressure since the leftist-populist government of PM Robert Fico took office last year. Fico has previously termed the adoption of children by same-sex couples “a perversion,” and mockingly invited opposition leader Michal Šimečka to “decide … whether he is a boy, a girl or a helicopter today.”
Meanwhile, Deputy Speaker of Parliament Andrej Danko, representing the far-right junior coalition partner Slovak National Party, said on Sunday that the culture ministry will no longer be financing movies with “themes crossing moral and ethical boundaries, including LGBTQ+.”
It’s not the first time Šimkovičová has expressed such sentiments. In January she announced the culture ministry would stop funding LGBTQ+ projects in order to “return to normalcy.”
Before joining Fico’s government Šimkovičová previously worked as a news anchor for the commercial station TV Markíza, which fired her in 2015 for sharing anti-migrant content on social media. She later joined disinformation channel TV Slovan, where she peddled conspiracy theories.
