Better than Rio and catching up with liberal values

The devout inhabitants of Swiebodzin in conservative western Poland have recently been featured in the global news media by out-competing the iconic Brazilian statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro:

Holy unveiling - The world’s largest statue of Christ was unveiled last Sunday in the western town of Swiebodzin. Standing at an impressive 52 metres and weighing 440 tons, the total project cost an approximate PLN 4.5 mln. “It looks amazing,” said one woman who was there to witness the ceremony. “That’s the only word I can use to describe it.” But not everyone is in agreement. Some have argued that the money could have been spent more wisely and that the statue borders on “megalomania”. A group of faithful gathers around the giant Christ statue soaring 36 metres (118 feet) towards the heavens. The Christ of Swiebodzin wears a crown of gold dethroned the landmark Jesus of Rio de Janeiro as the world's tallest statue of Christ.


Two items in the news this week testify to Poland’s gradual emergence as a liberal democratic and increasingly tolerant society. The first is from the BBC website:

John Abraham Godson, a Polish citizen born and raised in Nigeria, has been sworn in as the first black member of Poland's parliament. Mr Godson had served as a councillor in the city of Lodz before taking up a parliamentary seat, vacated by a party colleague after local elections. His entry into parliament has created a media stir in the mainly white country. He came to Poland in the 1990s, opening an English-language school and working as a pastor in a Protestant church. He has since married a Polish woman and the couple have four children.
A member of the centre-right Civic Platform party, he was appointed to the seat vacated by party colleague Hanna Zdanowska after she became mayor of Lodz. It is still quite rare to see black people even in the Polish capital Warsaw, Poland's most cosmopolitan city. Racism is still a problem in Poland, where it is not uncommon for well-educated people to make racist jokes. Mr Godson was beaten up twice in the early 1990s but he says attitudes to black people in Poland are changing for the better, particularly since the country joined the EU six years ago. Speaking earlier to Polish radio, Mr Godson said: "I am from Lodz, I will live here, I want to die here and I want to be buried here." I could mirror these sentiments, except possibly inserting a preference to be cremated!

The second item was the news of the first lesbian marriage of two Polish women. Admittedly, it took place in Sweden, but it was featured in a documentary film on a much watched TVN private channel and also on the news on the two state TV channels. Slowly the gay rights movement is establishing itself despite Kaczynski’s PiS party and Catholic Church condemnations. We saw the programme the day after we had watched the biographical film about Harvey Milk, brilliantly played by Sean Penn, controversially a ‘straight’ actor. Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the US, in San Francisco in the mid-70s and soon afterwards was made into a martyr when he and the open-minded mayor were assassinated by a rival politician. It will probably be 50 years after the US took this big step forward that such an event will happen here in Poland, but the advance into the political arena of a different, but also abused, minority figure, John Godson, moves us forward towards a greater degree of tolerance, despite the entrenched values of the still dominant church who teach love but deny the right of many to express it.