Please, help protect Lithuanians from the Republic of Lithuania

Hello,

I am a Lithuanian, and I ask you to give a helping hand to the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians who are deprived of family life by the Republic of Lithuania.

Many Lithuanians are deprived of their basic right to have a family

There are about 10 thousand children brought up in mostly state-owned Lithuanian orphanages. Judging by numerous reports in the media, the conditions there are depressing.

Former inhabitants of orphanages complain of physical punishments and Guantanamo-style treatment. For example, recently a 7-year-old girl who weighed only 5 kilograms has been brought to hospital from an orphanage in the Akmene district.

It is widely agreed that growing up in a family is optimal for every child. Adoption is generally much more preferable than life in orphanage. It would be impossible for even adoptive parents to let their child almost starve to death.

On the other side, there are about 200 thousand women more than men in Lithuania – which means that every seventh Lithuanian woman (every sixth female city dweller) is only statistically fated to have no regular male life partner.

Only a man and a woman are recognised as a family in Lithuania and are allowed to marry; two people can be parents of one and the same child only if they are married. These legal arrangements leave outside family life everybody who has no same-sex life partner or cannot marry officially – asexuals, homosexuals, persons who are not capable of having children in a natural way, cohabiting close relatives, etc.

Hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians are doomed by the Republic of Lithuania not to have children because of their physiology, morals, sexual orientation, bad statistical odds, or even low social position. Child allowances are miserable in Lithuania, as well as salaries, so an average working woman cannot afford to raise a child alone. The number of childless Lithuanian women is steadily growing.

Lithuanians are too scared to claim their basic human rights themselves

I am nationalist, and I cannot quietly watch the Republic of Lithuania destroying lives of hundreds of thousands of my compatriots. However, I can do practically nothing in Lithuania. I have tried to bring the matter to Lithuanian courts, but they have refused to even consider my applications.

The situation with human rights is very poor in Lithuania, which is rarely aired however because Lithuania is a loyal member of the European Union – any negative information about Lithuania would damage the public image of the EU itself. Human rights abuses and complete powerlessness of people against the state make them flee Lithuania.

Only in the last 4 years, 7 percent of the Lithuanians have emigrated. That has resulted in huge demographical disproportions in the society – the ratio between men and women actively looking for a life partner is about 1 to 7. As a result, the number of school pupils in Lithuania is drastically decreasing; it has dropped by 31 percent over the last 7 years.

On the other hand, I personally know a brother and a sister, who have lived all their life together but have never been allowed to adopt and two cohabiting sisters who apparently would like to have a common child but they do not know how to arrange it. I know cohabiting women who declare that they are not lesbians. Why are they not allowed to adopt? Why cannot a woman’s female life partner become also legal parent of her legal child?

To be honest, personally I do not know any couple that would declare themselves homosexuals, most probably, because in Lithuania gays and lesbians are too scared to declare their orientation.

Homosexuals are utterly stigmatised in Lithuania, and this is not going to change in the near future. It is of huge importance to the Catholic Church.

Boys with homosexual inclinations are supposed by Catholic communities to feel ashamed of it and confess their feelings only to the priests. Experienced Catholic priests have perfect opportunities to identify such boys during the rituals of Communion – they still put wafers directly into the mouth in Lithuania; in some churches priests even distribute wine, like in the Early Middle Ages.

The young Catholic gays who get used to satisfying their sexual needs with the priests have no other choice but a clerical career, which allows them to conceal their personal life behind the walls of churches and monasteries. If the Catholic Church abolished their negative stance on homosexuality, they would offer alternative life perspectives for Catholic gays and would soon face a dilemma of abolishing the obligatory celibacy of their priests or putting up with a sharp decline of their clergy.

As the public support of the Catholic bishops is thought to be crucial for the results of any election, loyalty to the Catholic Church is more or less directly declared by all the Lithuanian political parties and the vast majority of the media. Therefore, despite not being a clear-cut gay rights activist, I cannot count on any public support in Lithuania to my initiative to provide all the Lithuanians with a right to have a family.

The entire state apparatus, as well as the media, resist it because it seems impossible to legalise the rights to marry or (and) adopt children of asexuals and lesbians without recognising the right to have a family of gays, which is totally unacceptable for the Catholic Church.

Please, help somehow

That’s why I decided to apply to the European Court of Human Rights and to ask for help all those who are not indifferent to the fates of the thousands of children who are raised in Lithuanian orphanages and hundreds of thousands of women and men who are doomed to never have a family by the Republic of Lithuania.

And I am pleading with everybody – please, help to pressurise the Lithuanian authorities into recognising the basic human rights and freedoms of Lithuanians, into lifting the absurd prohibitions of same-sex marriages and adoption by unmarried couples that make many thousands of Lithuanians live childless and children in orphanages live without a family.

Lithuanians themselves are too scared to protest. The police ruthlessly prosecute everybody who express their opinion in public without permission, while the authorities seldom give such permissions to those who fight for human rights.

People in trouble usually emigrate from Lithuania or commit suicide – recently two teenagers (this time, girls) from the Silale district have suicided together by hanging themselves.

Therefore, if you do not feel indifferent, please, help somehow the people who are too much intimidated to claim their basic rights themselves.

With best regards,
Giedrius Šarkanas