Sources of religious authority in blocking the legal recognition of same-sex unions in post-communist member states of the European Union

Despite the increasing pressure from the European Union, the legal recognition of same-sex unions does not exist in most of the countries that accessed to European Union since 2004. Typically, it is first the state – parliament or government – which is willing to accommodate to the norms of EU and which in its attempts to harmonize national legislation with European law, comes into conflict with the religious elite and often with social attitudes as well. The paper argues that the ability of religious actors to block initiatives of legal recognition of families of same-sex couples depends on following variables: the degree of socio-economic modernization and the patterns of existential security perceived by the members of the society (Inglehart and Norris 2003; Norris and Inglehart 2004:112-127); the social attitudes regarding homosexuality, which remained more traditional-religious in most of post-communist Europe than they were in Western European societies (in this dimension of morality policy religious liberals are almost non-existing in Eastern Europe, in Estonia the disapproval of homosexuality is more widespread than belonging to religious denomination); religious culture; strategic ecumenical partnership of Christian churches (in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) in an attempt to exercise moral authority and to formulate a united ecumenical conservative Christian moral position in the public debates (a strategy not followed by dominant Churches in Poland and Romania); the assistance of secular allies in the national parliament and government; variations in policy legacies of the Communist period (in Hungary homosexuality was decriminalized three decades earlier than in former Soviet Union).