Citizens Fight Back: The case of Estonia
Posted on December 18, 2013
By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.
Varro Vooglaid
On the same day, I had the occasion of meeting Mr. Varro Vooglaid from Estonia, who gave a talk on how civil society in his country managed to prevent the government from tabling a bill that would have introduced same-sex “marriage” in the small Baltic Republic. This happened earlier this year, but it received practically no media coverage outside Estonia.
Mr. Vooglaid’s talk was very encouraging, because it showed that even in a deeply secularized and predominantly agnostic society like Estonia (where two thirds of the population have no religion) there is actually no support for the homosexualist re-definition of marriage.
“The LGBT-lobby would want to make us believe that it is a grassroots movement with broad support within Estonia. But in fact it isn’t. It has virtually no support among normal citizens, but is artificially kept alive by funding from the European Commission, some Northern European governments (especially Sweden), and two or three donors such as, in particular, George Soros’ ‘Open Society Foundation’. One could define it as the newest form of imperialism.”
The Estonian constitution foresees neither referendums nor citizens’ initiatives – democracy is limited to casting a ballot in national elections every four years, and leaving alone the politicians the rest of the time. People are not used to getting involved in direct democracy. When Mr. Vooglaid and his friends launched a popular petition that requested the Government to abstain from any attempt of providing a particular legal status to same-sex relationships, this was therefore something completely new and unprecedented in Estonian politics.
The petition immediately triggered angry reactions from the political establishment – with a high-ranking advisor and spokesperson of the country’s president going as far as saying that in her opinion “this petition shows a high level of intolerance, and could even be viewed as an attempt to incite hatred”.
Get that? Somebody starts a petition that, in civil and polite words, simply asks the country’s law makers to leave the law as it is – and gets accused of committing “hate crime”! In other words, only those who want to change the law have the right to express themselves and promote their point of view, whereas peaceful citizens who, acting peacefully and within the law, ask for nothing else than to leave the existing law unchanged are vilified and evicted from public debate.
Obviously, it didn’t stop there. The LGBT-lobby took the most extreme measures to prevent the initiative from being successful: it publicly invited people to send back empty statements of support in order to cause, as was explicitly stated, financial loss to the organisers (who had engaged themselves to assume the mailing cost for any statement that was sent back to them). They wrote letters to the organizers’ employers, asking them to dismiss them from their jobs (Mr. Vooglaid is a lecturer for legal philosophy at Tartu University).
They threatened to bring criminal charges on the basis of a law that prohibits “incitement to hate”. (Incitement to hate?? The petition simply asked the government not to change the current law!
Once more, one sees how the LGBT lobby tries to use the law to intimidate everyone who opposes their agenda even in the most civil and polite way…) They even mobilized the Consumer Protection Board to investigate whether collecting signatures to defend marriage and the family was an unlawful activity that could be subject to heavy financial sanctions.
Of course, all this activity of the LGBT-lobby had no legal basis and could itself with right be described as “hate crime”. But the political establishment and mass media turned a blind eye. (The lesson to be learned – for example in the context of the so-called “Lunacek-Report” is that any law that provides specific protection to “sexual minorities” will eventually lead to double standards in the application of human rights, and undermine the rights and freedoms of all those who do not belong to those minorities…)
The self-set target of the organizing committee was to collect 10.000 statements of support, which already is much in a country of merely 1.4 million inhabitants. But instead of 10.000, they received 38.000 signatures – and they could have received more, had not many citizens lacked courage. Many of the statements came back with hand-written comments, such as the following: “I agree with your petition and would like to support it – but am afraid that, as a public servant, I might be exposed to sanctions if I openly adhere to it”….
As one can see once again, the LGBT-lobby mainly works with bullying and intimidation. But one does not change people’s true opinion by bullying them. 38.000 signatures for a citizens’ initiative are unprecedented in Estonia. The government reacted by saying that for the time being they had no intention of proposing any legislation to formally recognize same-sex relationships.
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