It’s Highway to Hel no more in Poland, as the operator of the bus that’s in charge of the route going to a popular tourist site in the Eastern European country changed its number from 666 to 669.
Poland’s bus route 666 to Hel has been changed after facing backlash for ‘promoting satanism’ pic.twitter.com/Yy6NDnJ5MQ
In mid-September, The European Court of Human Rights ordered Polish authorities to pay pop star Dorota Rabczewska damages in the amount of $9,300 for a ruling they overturned.
The case goes back to a 2009 television interview where “Doda” said that she was more convinced by dinosaurs than the bible, adding that “it’s hard to believe in something written by people who drank too much wine and smoked weed.”
A Polish conservative party proposed a three-year jail sentence for anyone who insults the church or religious sentiments. The proposed law will strengthen Poland’s current blasphemy laws, increasing its scope to anyone who “publicly insults the church or interrupts mass.”
On New Year's Day, 2022, Archbishop Marek Jędraszewski of Krakow, Poland, issued a new decree that would impact relations between children and Catholic church officials. These stricter boundaries would drastically alter the practices of the diocese.
On September 25, 2019, Adam "Nergal" Darski, a founding member of Behemoth, posted a picture of his feet in his personal Facebook account, stepping on what appears to be a de-framed painting of the Virgin Mary.
In September 2020, in an interview with BBC’s Lucy Ash, Tomasz Sakiewicz, the editor of Gazeta Polska, a right-wing weekly magazine, said that he believes people should be allowed to have sex with whomever they chose to. Sakiewicz also noted that “aggressive ideology promoting homosexuality” is not suitable for Poland. More than half of the regions in Poland have established resolutions announcing that their community is “LGBTQ-Free.”
Three female Polish activists are on trial, facing two years in prison for offending religious feelings. They created an image of the Virgin Mary, Poland's sacred icon, wearing a rainbow halo.
The indictment follows an incident in April 2019, when posters and stickers bearing a rainbow-haloed version of the Black Madonna appeared near a church in Płock, a city in central Poland.The doctored image traded the golden halos around the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus with representations of a rainbow flag, a common symbol of the LGBT community.
