Officials debating potential anti-LGBT propaganda legislation

January 23, BPN. Belarusian authorities held a roundtable discussion on the prohibition of LGBT propaganda, the House of Representatives’ press office reported.

Maryna Škrob, of the lower chamber’s standing committee on health stressed that people are born with different genetic, physical and morphological characteristics but added that “there should be no” LGBT propaganda. Škrob, a gynecologist by profession, said that all aspects of an anti-LGBT propaganda bill must carefully considered to make sure that it does not come to the point of “absurdity.”

In late December 2022, Natalla Kačanava, chair of the upper chamber of the Belarusian National Assembly, said that Belarus should follow Russia in adopting anti-LGBT propaganda legislation.

A few months earlier, Dźmitryj Šaŭcoŭ of the Belarusian Red Cross Society described homosexuality as “a mental deviation and illness, that should be treated.”

The 2022 constitutional amendments changed the definition of marriage by describing it exclusively as “the union of a woman and a man.”