In an interview with Euronews' Europe Today show, Xavier Bettel said he once confronted outgoing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán about the law he had passed targeting LGBT people. Bettel said he told Orbán: "Being gay is not a choice, but being homophobic is a choice."
Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel compared the discrimination of minorities in Hungary under the Orbán government to policies of fascist regimes.
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Bettel, who was also Luxembourg’s prime minister from 2013 until 2023, recalled how he put his objections directly to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán during a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels.
“It's not the fact that I'm gay that I just fight for gay rights, but it's the fact that I fight for minorities and it's always easier to fight against the smallest group in some countries,” he told Euronews correspondent Shona Murray.
“As I told Viktor Orbán at that moment, it was not my choice [to be gay] and the most difficult part of that was to accept myself and then to get blamed because I'm different from him, and I said: 'Being gay is not a choice, but being homophobic is a choice',” Bettel said.
Bettel then likened the laws to those targeting minorities such as Jewish people or Roma across Europe in the past.
“To do politics by blaming someone reminds me seriously of how it starts with Jewish people and then with gypsies and etc.,” he said.
He was speaking to Euronews at a meeting of foreign ministers in Luxembourg when the European Court of Justice ruled that Hungary's anti-LGBTQ laws violate EU rules and infringe on equality and minority rights.
Orbán's legislation banned access to information or content on television or elsewhere relating to gay or transgender issues, arguing it violated child protection laws. It was widely-criticised by most EU countries, as well as by human rights groups when it was introduced in Hungary in 2021.
In an unprecedented move, the European Commission and 15 EU countries launched legal action against Budapest arguing that the legislation infringed on several rights established by the European Treaties. They also said it was "dangerously similar" to a law adopted by the Russian parliament in June 2013.
Europe’s highest court found this week that the law “stigmatises and marginalises" LGBTQ+ persons, and it breaches Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union which guarantees values of respect for "human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality".
Bettel said Orbán did not respond when he put his grievances to him in front of the meeting of 25 other EU heads of state and government, as well as President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and then President of the European Council, Charles Michel.
“It was a very clear answer from Viktor, because usually he always answers and he did not answer,” Bettel explained.
“And in the meeting room there was a silence when I took the floor, as the issue wasn't on the agenda,” said Bettel.
Bettel said he told Orbán his law wouldn’t stop people from being gay because they were born gay, and that banning access to content showing gay people from television would not work.
“I told Viktor at that moment that I didn't become gay because I watch TV.”