Hungary’s Constitution Adds Protection for Children

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On Tuesday, Dec. 15, Hungary adopted amendments to its constitution aimed at protecting children from the irreversible and damaging effects of transgenderism as well as being raised without opposite-sex parents.

The change was meant to strengthen the legal standing of the natural, heterosexual family and of the innate biological reality of the two sexes. Further, it aims to emphasize the Christian basis of Hungary's culture and the government's commitment to that culture's preservation and propagation.

The move — the ninth time the current Hungarian constitution has been amended since its adoption in 2011 — was made in response to promotion of ideologies in favor of homosexual relationships and "transgender identity" by the European Union, countries of Western Europe and the United States.

Most stipulations of the amendment would have been uncontroversial even 25 years ago but are now (in an ironically Orwellian use of language) being tarred as an effort to "redefine the family" through their insistence that the "family is based on marriage and the parent-child relation" and that "the mother is a woman, the father a man."

Though you'd never guess it from most media reports, the amendment is not part of a crackdown against homosexual relationships by the Hungarian government. It is actually part of public policy that not only allows homosexual relationships but positively sanctions them in the form of civil unions — placing Hungarian law further to the left on the issue than the American Democratic Party was during the presidency of Bill Clinton and approximating the position taken by Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign.

Regardless of what any of us might think about such a set of laws, the simple fact is that it would be hard to conceive of one that is more oriented towards "gay rights" while still recognizing the uniqueness and cultural necessity of a permanent union between two people possessing the complementary biological organs needed for natural procreation of the children who are that union's primary end.

Even a change the amendment introduced into Hungarian adoption law does not represent a substantial shift. Previously it was possible for heterosexual couples and single persons to adopt through ordinary processes. Now those who are single must go through a special process to obtain government approval as prospective adoptive parents, a process intended to ensure that those seeking to adopt really are single and not — as was sometimes the case — fraudulently claiming to be single while living in homosexual relationships.

Leftist opposition to the amendment's stipulations concerning marriage cannot, therefore, be grounded in any evidence that those in homosexual relationships will be prevented from living their lives as they want provided their lives really don’t impact the lives of others — others such as the children some homosexuals wish to adopt.

Leftist opposition can only be based either in profound ignorance of Hungarian law or disagreement with the Hungarian government's embrace of so-called hetero-normative beliefs — accepting heterosexual monogamous marriage as the normative context for sexual relationships and preferable environment in which to raise children. Combining legal sanctioning of homosexual relationships with official discouragement of them, or even treating them as good but second-rate, is now considered intolerable by many.

The real focus of the amendment does not, however, concern the homosexual relationships of adults. It concerns the well-being of children, whose healthy development the Hungarian government recognizes cannot take place in a context of "liberation" from either the "confining" structures of the heterosexual family or of the biological sex with which they are born. 

Rather than subject children to ideologies favoring embrace of a destructive "total freedom" to "self-create" one's own identity, the amendment assures "a child's right to self-identity in line with their gender at birth in order to protect the child from mental or biological intervention affecting their physical or mental well-being."

Put simply, neither rebellious teenagers nor young children who one day wish to become firemen when they grow up and on the next day wish to be doctors will be encouraged to "transition." They will be encouraged to accept that the sex they were born with is a biological fact beyond their control and will not be allowed to undergo surgery, whose long-term implications they cannot begin to appreciate, or in some cases even understand.

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