Post-communist countries have experienced of late a kind of inverted sexual revolution. You’ve heard about the appalling new law against “homosexual propaganda” in Russia, or perhaps the law banning civil partnerships in Croatia, but have you heard of the “war on gender” in Poland? This European Union poster boy, commonly presented to aspiring “Europeans” in Ukraine as the example to follow, has faced a storm of controversy over the issue of sex education. In Poland, the word “gender” has become a giant catch-all term, conflating anything that diverges from the conservative, patriarchal norm – it is on this threat that the church and its many allies in politics have declared war. According to a church official, “gender ideology” is worse even than communism.

The controversy was sparked by “gender workshops”. These are basically sex education classes – still hardly available in Poland – which were organised in pro-equality nurseries and schools, where children are shown alternatives in a context where getting married to a member of the opposite sex while a virgin is deemed the only acceptable solution. They were immediately smeared by the church and rightwing press, in a moral panic. “They are paedophiles, perverting our children,” it was claimed. The episcopate released a “letter on gender” to warn the faithful, read out in every parish over Christmas. There’s now also a special commission in the sejm (parliament), founded by the rightwing Law and Justice party, to “fight gender ideology”.

The Polish church itself was recently hit by paedophilia scandals, and responded by blaming parents and “broken homes”. The Council of Europe is awaiting Poland’s overdue ratification of the Istanbul convention on domestic violence, as our parliament worries that the new law might “hit the family”. It seems that in the minds of its most fervent defenders, the family unit’s only glue is violence and women’s serfdom.

The current backlash concerns any and all alternatives to an ultra-conservative Catholic upbringing. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are incessantly insulted by the church, and parliamentary officials compare their activities to zoophilia and paedophilia. A civil partnership law was thrown out in the sejm last year.

How does this sit with Poland’s glowing image abroad? When Meryl Streep gave an interview to promote her new film August: Osage County in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, she appealed to Polish politicians to get their act together: “I thought that after years of communism you’d caught up with the west in a social-cultural sense.” It’s a pity nobody told Streep that, in fact, it was during the People’s Republic when women in Poland enjoyed civil and reproductive rights. Although homosexuality wasn’t officially recognised (but wasn’t penalised), both abortion and contraceptives were legal and available. In today’s Poland, both doctors and pharmacists can deny women contraceptives, abortion law is the tightest in Europe (with attempts to punish women who do it illegally) and sex education practically nonexistent. Even scientists speak in one voice with the church: the Polish Academy of Sciences published a letter in which they called the gender workshops an attempt at “unseating children from their own sex”.

This situation can no longer be explained by the fact that the Catholic church was the only alternative under communism. It is the power of the church, not the old miasma of communism, which is profoundly and negatively influencing the social consensus. Statistics have shown that Polish women actually bear relatively more children in the UK, a country where they have access to sex education, contraceptives and abortion. Polish politicians’ pro-family crusade is having the opposite effect. But most of all, here we can see what a fallacy it is that a “liberal” economy means liberalism in social norms. As we in post-communist Europe show, the truth can be the opposite.

Agata Pyzik