The contradictions of not-so-gay Poland

A few weeks ago, Foreign Correspondent had an interesting story on Poland, which has a real culture warring Right wing government (in cahoots with particularly Right wing leadership in the Catholic Church), and one of the biggest targets of both is homosexuality.   It was a balanced take, though, and included a town mayor who was openly gay and said that he managed to get on with his life with no problems.   However, you still have several districts which make declarations that they are "LGBT free" zones, and stuff like this:

Poland is preparing to vote on a new law that would criminalise sex education and denounce those who teach it as paedophiles and LGBT+ activists.

so it's hardly a happy place for many gay folk, that mayor notwithstanding.

It's with that background that I was surprised to read in this article, on the mixed way formerly Communist Europe used to legally deal with homosexual activity, that Poland has long been, at least in a technical, criminalisation sense, liberal on the matter [my bold]:

 Poland presented the strongest divergence from the Soviet model. Same-sex acts continued to be formally criminalized in the country after the First World War, when the penal codes of the former occupants (Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary) remained in power. They mostly criminalized male same-sex acts, though the Austrian code included broader provisions against so-called ‘same-sex fornication’ and was indeed also used against women. The new Polish penal code of 1932, however, decriminalized consensual same-sex acts, and they have not been recriminalized since. This new law simply reflected the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which had been used as a model for the 1808 law of the Duchy of Warsaw, established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807 from the Polish lands ceded by Prussia. It was also influenced by the prominent Polish sociologists of that time, Antoni Mikulski and Leon Wachholz, who promoted the interpretation of homosexuality as innate. Interestingly, many Western countries – usually perceived as more progressive than Central and Eastern European countries – were lagging behind Poland with respect to the legal status of homosexuality. Denmark, for example, decriminalized same-sex acts in 1933, Sweden in 1944, England in 1967, Canada in 1969, West Germany in 1969, Austria in 1971, Finland in 1971, Norway in 1972, Ireland in 1993 and the United States, often considered as the prototype of the West, fully decriminalized homosexuality only in 2003, more than seventy years after Poland did so.

I would not have guessed that the country would have been under the influence of sociologists at that time.

So there's quite the disjunct between criminal law and culture acceptance in that country.  I suppose you could say the same of Asian countries such as Japan, where Wikipedia tells me:

Same-sex sexual activity was criminalised only briefly in Japan's history between 1872 and 1880, after which a localised version of the Napoleonic Penal Code was adopted with an equal age of consent.^[2]

yet it is only recently that gay people have started to be open about it on the media, and to their families.

Anyway, back to Poland:  the Foreign Correspondent story also noted that there had been a very large scale scandal of Catholic clerical child abuse revealed there not so long ago, very similar to the story elsewhere.  (Offending priests moved instead of prosecuted, etc.)   Again, it is hard to see how this will not erode the Church's authority on its teaching on sexuality.   Not sure how the right wing government got elected, though...