Contact Admin. Article unexpectedly became a barrier to the main priority--integrating the country into European institutions--of Romania's post-revolutionary governments. Rapporteurs from the Council of Europe, visiting Romania in April to investigate its human-rights record after it applied for admission, raised the issue of homosexuality. It is true that sexual relations between people of the same sex are a punishable offence under Article of the Romanian Criminal Code.
In pursuance of this text, a number of people are at present serving prison sentences for homosexuality. It must be said, however, that total decriminalisation of homosexuality would not seem possible at present, since acts of this kind are alien to the Romanian people's mentality, and offend the general moral feeling and religious conscience of the great majority of the population.
Even before the rapporteurs' visit, attempts to discuss Article in parliament had led to uproar. In February , when the article was mentioned in a debate on provisions against prostitution, Senator Emil Tocaci indignantly proposed that male homosexuals should be kept in women's penitentiaries, and vice-versa.
One nationalist newspaper advised the government to hang out a "fluorescent signboard" with the legend "Homo-sex-rom-euro-club. The Christian moral conception which remains the basis of our party's doctrine leads us to combat every deviation from the law of nature and from the moral principles of a future balanced society.
Without hesitation, in debating this point of American inspiration, we give the word that we are categorically opposed. We contend that liberty must be blocked by the liberty of others--when the collective sentiment of a group or a tradition is injured by some initiative pretending to be "progressive" and modern, we must oppose it.
