Michal is a mild-mannered 19-year-old. He describes himself as ‘a bit of a nerd’, plans a career making videos and came out as gay before leaving school last year.

‘I did not make a big deal of it and tell everyone, but just started incorporating talk about my boyfriend in conversations,’ he told me as we sat in the sun.

His parents were supportive and his classmates seemed unbothered. 

Yet Michal lives in a small market town in southern Poland that has declared itself an ‘LGBT-free zone’, sparking a furore that has sent shockwaves throughout Europe.

Tuchow, a town of 6,500 people that lies 65 miles east of Krakow, is among a wave of Polish communities making such declarations after the country’s ruling Right-wing party ramped up rhetoric against ‘the cult of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] ideology’. 

Politicians, priests and popular newspapers have called on people to stand firm against ‘a rainbow plague’ invading from abroad, even comparing its threat to the Communists and Nazis that so devastated their country last century.

Yet as Michal says: ‘I did not choose to be gay. But the ruling party chose to make an enemy of people like me, which is very sad.’

The LGBT-free zone decision, taken by a small commune in the conservative rural heartlands of a Catholic country, strikes at the principles of the EU – of which Poland has been a member since 2004 – which was founded on shared values of democracy, freedom and tolerance. 

One prominent politician called it a chilling echo from previous times in a town barely 100 miles from Auschwitz.

‘I learned in history books about Jew-free schools and shops and now they talk of LGBT-free towns,’ said Robert Biedron, a gay MEP from the liberal Left. ‘It reminds us of terrible times in the past.’

In a highly symbolic move, Tuchow and five other towns making similar anti-gay declarations had funding requests for twinning projects rejected last month by Brussels. 

One horrified French commune has also suspended ties after 25 years.

But fears remain that Brussels is avoiding taking tougher action against both Poland and Hungary, despite seeing the two countries’ hardline populist leaders chip away at some core values of democracy such as freedom of the press, human rights and judicial independence.

‘Europe must defend its values,’ said Biedron. 

‘But the trouble is our government is Eurosceptic so it will say the horrid West will not protect our children in Poland.’

This issue flared up last year after Rafal Trzaskowski, the centrist mayor of Warsaw, signed a landmark pledge of support for LGBT citizens that included anti-discrimination lessons in schools.

With elections looming, this was seized upon by the ruling Right-wing Law and Justice party in conjunction with the Catholic Church. 

They claimed it was a threat to family values, arguing that it would sexualise children and ‘propagate paedophilia’.

As the issue found traction with conservative voters, the rhetoric became cruder with ‘imported LGBT ideology’ compared to the social engineering of Nazis and Communists.

Marek Jedraszewski, archbishop of Krakow, even used last year’s 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising that tried to liberate the capital from the Nazis to denounce ‘a rainbow plague…born of the same neo-Marxist spirit’ as Bolshevism ‘that wants to control our souls, our hearts and minds.’ 

Then the Law and Justice party made this subject a central issue in last month’s presidential election, with its incumbent candidate Andrzej Duda claiming gay ‘ideology’ was more destructive than Communism and being ‘smuggled’ into schools. 

He beat Trzaskowski by a small margin.

Meanwhile, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party leader who really runs Poland, calls homosexuality ‘a threat to Polish identity, to our nation, to its existence and thus to the Polish state’. 

Others claim Poland – which decriminalised homosexuality almost a century ago, before other European nations – is trying to protect family values against ‘alien’ concepts such as gay marriage and gender fluidity.

‘It’s not fashionable to talk about Christian and traditional values but people see them as being disrupted in a way that is as alien to their country as Communism,’ said one sympathetic analyst, adding: ‘This is not to say that we are anti-homosexuals.’

Such thoughts were echoed by party officials in Tuchow. 

‘I don’t think homosexuals are worse than other people,’ said Grzegorz Niemiec, 32, a city councillor. 

‘But the Polish model of family, with men and women being married, is a traditional one we should defend.’ 

He said ‘LGBT-free zones’ were designed to protect children in schools, claiming there was international pressure to enforce sex education and inflict gender choice on primary school pupils as young as four.

One man in the town who firmly agrees with the policy is Henryk Trebaczkiewicz, 75. 

He said: ‘Communism was a plague and now we have the LGBT plague. This ideology is a danger not just to Poland but the whole world.’

The former factory worker, who I found reading in a rosary garden funded by the EU, said Brussels had made a mistake by cutting some of the town’s funding. 

His solution? ‘We should treat these people medically to help them become heterosexual.’

It was depressing to hear talk of homosexuality as a disease, especially in a state where more than two-thirds of LGBT citizens say they have suffered hate attacks. 

‘We are witnessing the manifestation of ignorance,’ said one activist.

The mother of a gay man who killed himself in June warned a newspaper that there would be more victims if political leaders did not desist from hate-filled rhetoric. 

‘Such people destroyed my son – day by day and step by step,’ said Katarzyna Koch. ‘Every day I ask myself: What is this country where you have to die to be happy?’

Earlier this year Poland was branded the worst country in the EU for LGBT people by a Brussels-based advocacy group. 

A gay pride march in the city of Bialystok last summer ended in violent clashes after it was attacked and stoned by opponents.

One Krakow teacher told me she could not tell colleagues she was lesbian for fear of being sacked – yet ironically since her partner had come out as transgender, she could start talking about having a boyfriend.

Most people I met in Tuchow opposed the town’s anti-gay declaration. 

‘I am ashamed,’ said Magdalena Pawlak, a school teacher sitting near the town hall with her daughter Amelia, nine.

‘I don’t know why this hatred has to be spread so much.’

Taxi driver Piotr Wojtanowski said almost all his friends were opposed to the stance. ‘

There is so much scaremongering about adoption and sexualisation of children. 

‘I know a lesbian couple living here illegally with children and they seem fine.’

He said he had stopped going to church because of anti-gay propaganda from the pulpit.

‘When an archbishop compares LGBT ideology to a plague, that is unacceptable. I’m religious but was taught to love my neighbours, not hate them.’ 

Equality campaigners argue that the Catholic Church’s stridency on the issue is a cynical attempt to cover up its culpability in failing to tackle appalling cases of paedophilia by priests.

Certainly the eruption of the furore last year coincided with a damning TV documentary that sparked uproar in Poland by exposing how church leaders for decades had buried complaints of abuse and disgracefully moved accused priests to new parishes.

Yet it was also triggered after Trzaskowski – the first Warsaw mayor to attend the LGBT equality parade in this culturally conservative country – entered the presidential race as the candidate for the centrist Civic Platform party and his poll ratings surged. 

‘This government is quite cynical,’ said Trzaskowski. ‘They thought they could stir up voters over LGBT issues by portraying it as this foreign ideology threatening decent Polish families.’

Trzaskowski also told me it had been a mistake to talk about LGBT, an unfamiliar term in Poland, rather than phrases such as equality for gay and transgender citizens. ‘These are new issues here, so it is hard to discuss them in an informed way.’

Yet as he argues, populism is on the rise in many places – and the Law and Justice party is crudely exploiting social divisions seen in several other democracies, including Britain and the United States, between cities and countryside, old and young, rich and poor.

Poland has had a remarkable run of economic success since Communism ended in 1989, with growth stretching back 28 years aided by huge Brussels handouts.

I noticed, for instance, they funded the road I drove along from Krakow to Tuchow.

Yet Trzaskowski admits his party shares some responsibility for some disenchantment in struggling communities from its time in government between 2007 and 2015. ‘We were changing the country so rapidly,’ he said.

‘But some people said they’d had enough of paternalistic elites telling them to be happy when gaps were widening.’

Or as Nina Gabrys, who heads the equality committee on Krakow city council, says: ‘We were building bridges but left behind the people who wanted their country back. Now this is being done in the most horrible way.’

The Law and Justice party cleverly exploited such concerns under its leader Kaczynski, a wily 71-year-old political operator who started out as an anti-Soviet activist. 

A lifelong bachelor and strong nationalist, Kaczynski has never owned a computer, only opened his first bank account in 2009 and has taken just one holiday outside Poland to visit cousins in neighbouring Ukraine.

His party’s stance on several other issues has sparked alarm across Europe, especially its bid to control the judiciary with purges and pack sympathisers on key courts. 

‘We’re still a democracy but democracy is under attack,’ said Warsaw mayor Trzaskowski.

There have also been concerns over the politicisation of the security services, turning state-owned media into propaganda organs, putting pressure on charities with foreign links and anti-German rhetoric, including demands for huge war reparations.

In recent days, there have been fresh threats made against German-owned media along with an outcry over Berlin’s appointment of a new ambassador whose father was one of Hitler’s military aides. 

‘I can remember Communist times and it was much more subtle in terms of propaganda than it is now,’ said one leading political figure. 

However, the situation is not nearly as bad as in Hungary, where autocratic prime minister Viktor Orban poses as a defender of traditional Christian values, takes pride in creation of the ‘illiberal state’ and scorns EU elites while his wealthy cronies milk the system.

Hungary, and now Poland, have shown Brussels’ weakness in face of aggressive threats to the EU’s core values.

Last month, the two nations fought off attempts to link spending by Brussels to compliance with the rule of law.

Eight months ago, the European Parliament condemned bigotry against LGBT citizens and told Poland’s government to revoke the hostile declarations being made by towns such as Tuchow. 

Its demand was ignored.

Then the Warsaw government gleefully stepped in to make up the town’s loss of income after Brussels rejected its application for a grant of up to £22,000 under its twinning programme – and handed it more than twice that sum.

‘We are supporting a municipality that promotes support for well-functioning families and fights against the imposed ideology of LGBT and gender, which is being pushed by the European Commission,’ said Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro.

The courts’ failed attempts to stand up to the Polish government’s hardline agenda have dismayed activists such as Artur Barbara Kapturkiewicz, a transgender doctor and co-founder of a Christian group called the Faith and Rainbow Foundation.

‘These people think that Poland is the only moral country that will reawaken the West and renew Christian values,’ he says.

‘But this is the politics of discrimination and dehumanisation – and it soils our nation.’

Every president needs moral authority to lead

The Dallas Morning News is publishing a multipart series on important issues for voters to consider as they choose a president this year. This is the third installment of our What’s at Stake series, and it focuses on presidential leadership. Find the full series here.

There is a flawed and perhaps even misbegotten public perception about the presidency that too often distracts us from accurately assessing candidates for the office. Too often, it seems, we operate with the belief that every president enjoys the same amount of power simply because he occupies the same office as his predecessors.

If that were true we wouldn’t see some presidents extending their influence while others appear to shrink in office. In fact while the office of the presidency is infused with power, much of the president’s ability to lead exists outside of the official lines of authority. Much of a president’s power stems from what Theodore Roosevelt termed the bully pulpit.

Other political offices allow the men and women who hold them to command public attention. But no other office in the United States approaches the scale or the immediacy the American president has to command public attention and thereby potentially rally public support.

But here a president’s power is tempered by outside forces. Every president may get a megaphone, but simply shouting louder than everybody else doesn’t make a person powerful. Influence often stems from the moral authority a president can amass using that bully pulpit.

When a president calls us to a greater national purpose or makes decisions that are broadly seen as fair and driven by good impulses, he (and someday she) can drive extraordinary results. He’ll have the public on his side, even when many people disagree with his policies if what he is pursuing is fair, instills pride in national action, or serves laudable goals. And such public support can transcend poll numbers, as we saw with George W. Bush when in his second term he was able to win support for military spending from an anti-war Democratic Congress. Much of the country was turning against the war, but the country wasn’t going to turn against its soldiers.

Marshaling moral authority

So what’s at stake in our presidential elections is more than who will hold the office. What’s at stake is whether the person who wins in November can marshal the moral authority necessary to unite the country, prioritize national problems, and rally our political system to carry us through perilous moments ahead.

Presidential leadership is one of those topics that fills history books. It is much harder to spot in real time than with the lens of history. But there are compelling examples from recent history and from our toughest moments as a country that offer relevant lessons for the challenges the country faces today.

First, we’ll take on a misleading cliché. It’s often been said that in a moment of crisis, this country tends to rally behind its president and therefore has built-in strength. We think of Franklin D. Roosevelt following Pearl Harbor, when he led this country into World War II, joined a coalition against two of the dangerous tyrannical regimes and prevailed.

But assuming national unity is automatic in a crisis is a false reading of history. This nation has often been united in tough moments because of the sound leadership of our president. Consider, for example, the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Many people today will remember a united country, but a careful reading of events shows deliberate approach that led the country through the shock of the moment, away from raw anger, and toward a more productive strategy of combating terrorism systematically with the help of NATO and other allies.

The groundwork for that unity was laid with speeches made in the two weeks that followed the attacks. From the Oval Office, Bush calmed the country. From a mosque in Washington, D.C., he pushed against religious bigotry. From the national cathedral he helped the country mourn. And from Ground Zero he gave a speech of just a few dozen words: “I hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people … who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon.” These impromptu remarks captured the raw emotions many Americans felt and channeled them into a productive outlook, thereby setting up his speech to a joint session of Congress that put forward a plan for responding to the attacks. The country rallied because of a broad perception that the civilian authorities had a handle on the sudden, understood what Americans felt, and were going to meet the new challenge facing us.

If that seems like a simple point, it has profound implications. In a moment of crisis a leader needs to instill confidence in his or her vision for facing the future. Had FDR waffled after Pearl Harbor, the country likely would have fractured with a debate about what to do. If Abraham Lincoln was unsure of what he wanted in 1861, it’s likely the North would have split amid competing factions, some of which wanted reconciliation with the South on any terms. And following 9/11, if the president failed to offer a response most people could believe in we’d remember that period as one of national division.

There are few permanent political victories, so partisan politics did reemerge after 9/11 and we’ve had serious debates about a series of national security decisions that followed. But, especially when our nation has been attacked and suffered great losses, there are enduring political legacies in our history, most of which stem from a president understanding the moral question of the moment and acting to meet it, even if doing so required overcoming opposition.

Lincoln sits at or near the top of presidential rankings because he understood the moral underpinnings of the Civil War and called the nation to a higher moral purpose of abolishing slavery. Lincoln’s legacy endures today because he translated the national sacrifice into a moral gain.

More recently, in George H.W. Bush, we saw a president who understood the moral power of uniting Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall even as West German officials appeared hesitant to unite their own country. Bush’s leadership ensured the arc of history would lead to expanding freedom in the eastern half of Germany and much of the rest of Eastern Europe.

There are other such historical examples. Dwight D. Eisenhower used the power of the United States to stand against communist aggression on the Korean Peninsula, which cemented the American position in the Cold War to counter the expansion of a tyrannical ideology. John F. Kennedy also showed his dedication to checking Soviet aggression during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Ronald Reagan famously marshaled public opinion against the Soviet Union. In each case, we can see how the president offered moral clarity on fundamental issues involving human freedom and the ability of this country to defend itself against a would-be ascendant ideology.

On domestic policy, there usually isn’t a stark contrast between good and evil. Instead, what’s required of a president (or presidential candidate) is to amass moral authority by uniting Americans behind common solutions, offering an optimistic tone, and by having the courage to pay a political price to make hard decisions that might be unpopular with some in the short run but will lead the country to a better place in the long run.

Barack Obama’s speech in Dallas following the July 7 slayings of police officers helped bridge a political divide, for example. And Gerald Ford’s decision to offer a path to citizenship to people who fled Vietnam after the war put him in line with the values of most Americans whose heart broke for refugees of the conflict America had just withdrawn from.

Other presidents confront openly immoral positions. We think here of Lyndon B. Johnson pushing for civil rights legislation even while facing down bigots inside (and outside) of his party. His push to expand voting rights was difficult at the time but undeniably built a better future for the country.

Few appreciate that one aspect of Harry Truman’s successful campaign in 1948 was that he showed the limited political reach of segregationists by winning election while also facing down a third-party Dixiecrat candidate.

The success of a president

A thread running through successful presidential candidates and influential presidents is that in word and deed they demonstrated that they understood the larger moral struggle facing society and then led by inspiring other Americans to join with them. One aspect of that leadership is often successful presidents forge stable and lasting teams of advisers who serve with them for years, often in very demanding posts, and therefore can develop and implement needed reforms.

In real time, it can be difficult to see how such leadership will work out. For example, in the 1980s Reagan was castigated for offering seemingly simplistic views and millions of Americans thought he was risking nuclear war with a confrontational rather than a conciliatory tone toward the Soviets. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt faced a large portion of the country that opposed entering World War II before Pearl Harbor even as he took steps that proved useful when we eventually did enter the war.

But in the end, the presidents who rise to the top, who prove to have enduring political legacies, are the ones who navigate past partisanship and instead focus on leading the country as a whole to serve a purpose greater than ourselves. Every president will claim to do so, of course, but not all of them actually do it. The anti-AIDS initiative, PEPFAR, endures because saving millions of people from the ravages of a brutal disease is something this country can be proud of. Lincoln and FDR will always rise to the top of presidential rankings because they were willing to rally others through prolonged and brutal wars against tyranny. We suspect the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will rise in history’s assessment if democracies long endure in those countries as well. In any case, it will prove to matter that this country responded to terrorism by supporting the spread of democracy.

At the same time, Andrew Johnson will always belong at the bottom of presidential rankings. He set the stage for the rise of Jim Crow and decades of oppression. Similarly, we suspect Richard Nixon will never be vindicated by history. His was a presidency without a moral center.

An American century

What’s at stake this year is a decision about who can better rally the country to meet its crises and orient itself toward greater purpose. History will notice if we, as Lincoln called for, serve the better angels of our nature. And history will reward us if we act on the belief, as a more recent president noted during a different time of crisis, that “[w]e are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.”

Today we face a pandemic, a recession and a rise of authoritarian states. We are faced with a crucial test of American leadership in the world and at home, a leadership founded by the sacrifice, ingenuity and commitment of the American people and their elected officials. As in the past, we need a president who believes we can learn from history and who can act on the belief that we have the power and talent to once again create “a more perfect union.”

That, we believe, goes hand in hand with defending and spreading liberal democracy well into the 21st century. There is no reason why, with the right leadership, this young century cannot be another American century; and, moreover, that a more unified United States of America cannot stand as a beacon of progress, both social and economic, for another century and beyond.