This is the speech delivered by Dr. Jurášek, a counselor to the Slovak prime-minister, at the Conservative Summit, held in Bratislava in November 2024. Presented here with the kind permission of the author.
-- from the Editor
Nov. 29, 2024

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What is the best way to preserve and spread national and conservative values?

For long years I believed it is this: to deeply follow your conscience, intuition, what you feel deep inside, do it with your full heart, positive attitude, pure intention and to not care whether it is popular or politically effective. I believed that if you do the right thing, then God, Providence, Fate, vis maior – you name it – will make the rights thing happen at the right time.

For me, that meant I did not care about what is popular, just what is true; I did not care whether my articles were read by a hundred or by a hundred thousand, whether I was praised by anyone, whether I would one day be elected or have a career in politics. I did not want any sponsors, I did not want to work with political parties. I did not want any money for what I was doing. It had to be pure, volunteering, bottom-up, grassroots. That was the purest form of activism I could envision. I felt as a speck of light against a big, bad system.

Actually, there is a name for this approach. It was coined by Václav Havel, with whom I disagree on many things, but I believe he got this one right. He named it the “power of the powerless”, which basically means that if you face a big, bad, totalitarian system, it might feel hopeless at first. But if you observe more carefully, you find that the system has many internal tensions and inconsistencies. Many people follow it out of fear, greed or mindless, mechanical habit; there is very little authenticity and morality. So even though the system may seem powerful from outside, it is dead inside.

Thus, all one has to do is to live according to their moral standards, authenticity, do small, every day, civic acts of justice and they can be sure the evil system will crumble to dust – sooner or later. You don’t know how, you don’t know why, but it is a given. In paraphrase, if you have good intentions and follow them honestly, God will take care of everything else.

And I am still convinced of it now. But I learned that sometimes, Providence, or God, works in ways you would not expect.

A year ago, still deeply entrenched in the “power of the powerless” principle, I unexpectedly got the offer to become an advisor of the prime minister. After some thought, I gratefully accepted, and viewing politics from inside, I learned several lessons.

First, the forces we are standing against are immensely powerful and have a spectacular head start. Of course, I knew of this before, but now, I see it from the inside, in my everyday work, is a whole new experience. The “system” we are standing against is brutal. From this follows that while “power of the powerless” is a viable and important strategy, it should not constitute all of our activism. Especially, if life or Providence, gives you the option to be a bit less powerless, you should not hesitate to use it. You are not just a lilly of the field, but you have been entrusted with some talents.

Second, we are all people, full of faults and morally conflicted. No one is perfect, but that doesn’t mean they cannot stand up for the right thing. And I realized that Providence sometimes picks people who are not ideal, but can do the right thing, at the right place, at the right time. A fresh example is what happened last week in the US. Donald Trump – against all mainstream odds – will return to the White house. While he is hardly an ideally moral person from the conservative viewpoint, I believe that – in the broader scheme – in many ways, he is standing on the right side.
There is a reason why Donald Trump has made it to the White House twice, and none of us here has, and why Robert Fico has made it to the Prime Minister of Slovakia twice, and none of us here has – although we may think we are better representatives of conservative moral values.

And this is my challenge to conservatives – and there are conservatives like this, even in this room – who somehow shy away from working with people like Donald Trump, Robert Fico and others because they may seem not nice enough – which seems “unconservative” – or they, according to the media, are corrupt or whatever. Our work should be with everyone who, at least partly, shows an open heart for conservative values and we should be helping them to become a better version of themselves, if they are willing to listen.

But there is a red line. We have all heard rallying cries of the progressives in the sense that politicians like Fico, Trump or Orbán will in short time steamroll liberalism and deconstruct democracy. That is, of course, absurd fearmongering. They don’t want it, they don’t need it and they don’t have the means to do it. Given all the circumstances, all they can do, is make the system less imbalanced, and a bit fairer towards conservatives. And slow down the progressive steam roller.

However, odds may change in the following decades. And we must be very wary not to become the monsters we are fighting now, as Nietzsche would warn us.

Many see what is happening now as a war about the future of our civilization, or even our very survival. I don’t disagree. On the other hand, with a war mentality, you think differently. Under an existential threat, all is suddenly allowed. It brings black and white splits and contempt towards the other side. Let’s face it: some conservatives can measure up to progressives in the fanaticism and one-sidedness of their beliefs.
Thus, we must always be reminding ourselves, that – even if we are fighting – we are fighting for something, not against. We are fighting for a society that is living according to natural law, but is free at the same time, a society that has picked the right side consciously and willfully, and not because it was forced to do so.

This is the path of a conservative activist. All three ingredients are needed: we have to have good intentions, we have to be practical (the lion and the fox), but without losing respect for the other side, and strive for freedom, not a society in which we unfairly dominate – as the progressives often do today in many ways. That is no easy task, but we are not conservatives so that our work is easy, but so that what we do is right.

Thank you.

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Dalibor Jurášek is a lawyer and activist, co-founder of the Institute for Paradigmatic Reforms. He co-organized several civic initiatives and petitions in the areas of freedom of speech, education, and environmental protection. Currently, he serves as an advisor to the Prime Minister of the Slovak Republic on civil society issues." Visit his website at: www.ippr.sk/en

 

 

 

 

 

3rd International Conference "Central Europe at The Crossroads"
Hosted by Patrimonium Sancti Adalberti
Prague, October 25-27, 2024

Bulgaria and Security Challenges in Central Europe
Viktor Kostov, Ph.D.
„Свобода за всеки“ (Freedom for All)

(The speech was delivered at the morning panel session of the conference on October 26)

Dear organizers of this conference,
Honorable guests,

In this presentation I will suggest my opinion as a human rights and pro-family lawyer, and a student of culture and the Christian faith, as to how Bulgaria is contributing, and will possibly contribute in the future, toward the goal of security, stability, and cooperation in Central Europe.

Firstly, these two concepts, security and stability, in the modern world mean law and order without sacrificing individual freedoms.

I will address the two main challenges to geopolitical security in the region. These are 1) the subversion of fundamental human rights by redefining those or flatly violating them, even over benevolent pretexts, and 2) the erosion of the sovereignty of the individual states and their peoples.

Here I will list several interconnected threats to security and stability for the Central European region.

Undermining human rights by redefining them or completely abrogating them by powerful, non-elected elites, in violation of sovereign democratic constitutions and international law.

#1. Rogue ideologues who exhibit disregard for the natural order and show hatred for God and humanity. One example is Uval Harari, a University of Jerusalem professor and spokesman of the infamous World Economic Forum. A man with a “husband” and with misanthropic ideas well favored by the legacy media and naive audiences. Harari’s ridiculous explanation of human rights nears genocidal overtones. He publicly states, basically, that regular people are “useless eaters” and that “there is no God and no human rights.” Harari explains: “If you cut a man open you will see organs, but you won’t see human rights.” This level of ludicrous reductionism and deconstruction of humanity is applauded while it surely qualifies, by their own standards, as “hate speech.” Theorists of this rank proliferate in the organizations that yield power over our states. They filter down through groups of rich and powerful do-nothings like WEF whose unconcealed goal is to save the earth while depriving individuals all over the world of liberty, property and happiness; and while assuring us that slavery is what we have always wanted.

#2. Attack on freedom of conscience and speech. It happens by introducing euphemisms like “fighting misinformation and disinformation” and even “malinformation” (whatever that is). Introduction of censorship and control of the flow of information in gross violation of the sovereign constitutional principles of the nation-states in Central Europe and of international law.

#3. Warmongering and propaganda. Parallel with limiting “unapproved” opinions and information on important societal and political issues, we see the rise of censorship and propaganda. The list goes on: 1. Disregard for life by the industrial military complex interested in creating and protracting wars for selling weapons and making profits on the back of human lives; 2. Reckless speeches by high level politicians who have little or no understanding of diplomacy or history; 3. The irresponsible lack of a determined pursuit of cease fire and peace in the Russo-Ukrainian war, which puts the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe on the verge of being involved in the largest military conflict and tragedy since WW2.

I can assure you that the people of Bulgaria have no interest in joining wars stoked by rich and powerful elites who may not even be able to point out the country on a map. I do not doubt that this feeling is shared by many other citizens of the Central European nations.

#4. War on the natural family, and the dignity of man and the person, and on personal privacy. This war is waged through sexual education imposed on small children; LGB propaganda promoted in schools; re-definition of human rights to create new rights like trans-rights, right to sexual orientation, or “marriage equality.”

One notable example is the Istanbul Convention. It is noteworthy that Bulgaria, represented by large segments of parents and churches, and of course by the movement on rights, freedoms and family privacy which we Freedom for All, and ROD International, represent, and also by the Supreme Courts of the country, firmly rejected the redefinition of man and woman as proposed by this international fiasco of a treaty. However, not to be outdone, the sexual liberation (or aberrations?) movement, with its firm grip on political power, continued to introduce fragments of the Istanbul Convention, piece by piece in other forms of legislation and policies. Here is some international history.

In the early stages of redefining fundamental human rights and marriage, in 2013, the British prime minster, James Cameron, announced that he wanted to export their law on same sex marriage to the whole world. What an illustration of imperialism. That was one of many brazen pronouncements from the so-called elites that they want to socially engineer not only the people in their countries but the whole world. Since then that pronouncement has metastasized in all spheres of life; including by way of pressure from the EU that Central European peoples adopt this new inverted morality where good is evil and evil good, and where truth is treated as a lie and the other way around. Here is the mechanism of moving to a totalitarian state:

A totalitarian state creates a totalitarian society, the result of which is totalitarian thinking. The method of creating a totalitarian society is not complicated. It contains two main components: (1) violence against dissenters and opponents and (2) manipulation of the masses through mass propaganda. Thus, by instilling fear, totalitarian leaders create the conditions for self-censorship and reformulation of the truth. Through propaganda, tyrants change the terminology and mental categories of the people and mold them to their own ideology.[1]

An example in this regard is the centralization of social life in the hands of the state. Last year the neoliberal Bulgarian Ministry of Culture funded with tens of thousands of euro drag-queen shows, something unheard of in Bulgarian history and tradition.

Attack on fundamental rights and especially freedom of speech and freedom of conscience

In order to enslave, one has to deprive individuals of their right to think, believe, and speak. Thus, those in power, who want war, or radically new sexual order, propagandize for it, by controlling all opinions that differ.

To quote the modern-day political prophet, the US journalist Tucker Carlson, “If they take away your ability to speak, they take away your dignity, and your freedom. Without freedom to speak your mind you become a slave.” Carlson did not invent this important truth. However, his restatement of it also shows how far contemporary “free” societies have sunk into political correctness and self-censorship.

Thus, the biggest threat to security, or rather to freedom and justice, the censorship of people’s beliefs and conscience, and thoughts; along with the free flow of information.

The United Kingdom, the cradle of democracy and human rights, has officially become a police state where people are criminally prosecuted for silent prayer in their thoughts. Several days ago, a man, Adam Smith-Connor, was convicted as a criminal by a British court for praying silently in front of an abortion clinic back in November of 2022. This abomination of justice and a violation of any human rights international treaty only shows that the British problem is not solved by their Brexit, and that the totalitarian virus is alive and well not only in Brussels.

Bulgarian Contribution and the Central European Project

The push toward the sexualization and propagation of an inappropriate and twisted sexuality to children is not something that Bulgarians appreciate. A few weeks ago, the Bulgarian parliament passed a law, almost unanimously, that homosexual and transgender propaganda will not be allowed in schools. It will not be immodest to point to the fact that our organizations’ work has a lot to do with this awakening of the political class to the needs of regular people and to the need to defend children from predatory influences. Placed in the context of the conservative and pro-family movements in the region this is a significant marker.

The Bulgarian government is yet to engage in the current conversation on the Central European project. Yet the global issues affect the national state, and the sooner government officials warm up to exploring the opportunities of the current discussion we are having here the better decisions they will make in leading the country.

What else can Bulgaria offer to stable geopolitics?

A tangible Bulgarian contribution in the light of security, as I defined it above, is from grassroots movement and field defense of the family and human rights and dignity. As a human rights lawyer and a Christian, my organization has worked hard to defend freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and speech, in the courts and in public debate. We have won cases at the European Court of Human Rights and on a local level. Just weeks ago, we won Dr. Hristo Laftchiev’s case who was criminally prosecuted for his criticism of anti-family policies. For the third time, within the same proceedings. Dr Laftchiev is an outspoken pro-family activist and his publicly shared opinions in defense of the traditional family rattled the NGO world. We won the case on the merits and even if the appellate court tried to revive it twice, on a rather weak legal basis, we finally had the case dismissed in the beginning of October.

My colleague lawyer Vladimir Sheytanov, who is here today, and I were also sued for defamation by the same NGO for expressing our criticism of the anti-family ideology in TV program in 2020. We successfully defended ourselves and defended freedom of speech. Moreover, we countersued for defamation and won both cases. The case was closed just a few months ago. 

Together with other lawyers and leaders we worked to have a family oriented-patriotic movement defending the family, personal and family privacy, and fundamental human rights.

This work comes at a price as we are called extremists by the anti-family and anti-freedom gangsters. However, as a Christian, I love my enemies.  That love includes the duty to not let them prevail in their lies, deception and tyranny. Disciplining your opponent with the truth is a clear exercise of Christian charity.

This forum is of critical importance for waking up governments and politicians, as well the people, to the dangers of globalists expansions. A solid international community of peoples is important for a better world; however, it should not come at the expense of national sovereignty, independence and freedom. Participation in a Central European alliance of equally small, non-imperialistic nations may turn out to be a solution for escaping from the “always-bullied-by-the-big-guy” paradigm and provide support toward a good political goal. In that international community freedom to believe and speak will remain the best guarantee for informed decisions in public policy and for a just, free, and secure society. Otherwise, those who do not speak against the lies today will not be allowed to think the truth tomorrow.

 

Notes

[1] Mechanics of Totalitarianism, 2009, Freedom for All. https://svobodazavseki.com/mehanizam-na-totalitarizma-postkomunisticheski-transformatzii/ Access: Oct 22, 2024

The photo below: A moment from the work of the conference

 

Speech at the Conference “The Future of Central Europe,” Prague, Oct. 13-15, 2023

Delivered on October 14, 2023
by Viktor Kostov

Honorable guests of this conference,

Dear hosts of this important event,

It is an honor and a privilege to be invited to share at this timely gathering.

Introduction

Freedom for All, or “Svoboda za vseki,” is our organization with 20 years of experience in defending human rights and debating theological issues and church and state relations. We started this work in Bulgaria to restore human freedom and dignity after the collapse of the totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe.

We believe that the realm of human rights, in relation to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a good approach to engage in the Great Commission. Part of fulfilling the commandment to teach the nations Christ’s teachings is to oppose the tyranny of godlessness and the hatred of our neighbor. In law and politics, the defense of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and other fundamental human rights is a system of values that reflects love for our fellow man. The protection of the right to family privacy is one of these foundational and recognized human rights.

In this presentation I will submit that the traditional family is under ideological attack. I will also propose that our duty before God to defend the rights of parents and children, as well as defending human freedom and dignity, can be unifying factors for Central Europe.

We, at Freedom for All, have taken cases and presented briefs and legal opinions before the local and Supreme Courts of Bulgaria, as well as taken cases to the European Court of Human Rights. This year we won a case against the Bulgarian government for viciously slandering evangelical Christians in the coastal city of Burgas back in 2008. The case lasted 14 years. In 2018 Bulgaria rejected the signing of the infamous Istanbul Convention whose goal is to redefine man, woman, and sexuality. This was a victory which was won in part because of our previous work against the draft of the Child Law of 2012 and similar “progressive” initiatives.

In 2021 we filed a brief with the Bulgarian Constitutional Court in defense of the Constitution’s definition of man and woman as a biological reality, not a social construct. A few weeks ago, we filed a brief with the Bulgarian parliament, along with over 20 other churches and organizations, against the attempt to introduce censorship by banning the so-called “hate speech.” We have defended parental and family rights while creating a network with churches, and with established and emerging organizations, locally and internationally. The freedom to believe, speak and assemble are freedoms any tyrant hates. For our work of pushing back on the normalization of sexual perversion and turning it into a novel “human right” we were recently labeled, along with others, an “extremist group” by an extremist anti-family and anti-Christian website.[1]  

Today, if you defend the family, common sense, and the traditional notion of human rights you are labeled an “extremist.” Tertullian, the church father of the 3^rd and 4^th centuries, rightly noted that the first reaction to truth is hatred.

Human rights originate in the church and the Christian faith. The apostles in Acts established freedom of religion and freedom of speech as the fundamental freedoms, naturally stemming from the liberation of the human being in Jesus Christ. Later, in the time of the Enlightenment, humanism adopted the idea of human rights and largely separated them from the faith. Yet classic human rights remain, mainly, a legal tool for defending justice.

The family is the institution, which was created first, long before the civil government or the total state. Yet, undoubtedly, we are currently witnessing a neo-Trotskyite, Marxist, Bolshevik, and Jacobin progressive agenda implemented in the West. This agenda is pushed by the globalist so-called “elite” and “stakeholders” to control sovereign nations. It includes a vicious fight to redefine man’s sexuality and the nuclear family and to turn those into a parody of their natural design. There seems to be a goal to deprive people of fundamental human rights and freedoms. This is clearly seen in current political trends and events.

It is no secret that the European Union promotes the politicization of human sexuality among European nations. The abandonment of Christianity and the introduction of new “human rights” in defiance of common sense, tradition, and human obligation is posing the question if the Union can live up to its own democratic values.

Looking into the Future of Central Europe

The reasons for Central European cooperation are found in history, in language, and in culture, but above all in the Christian faith. The common major historical challenges our nations have had to face in history are those of the Ottoman Empire and communism. These are political systems opposed vehemently to the values of Christianity. Also, the history of Europe is marked by the missionary work of many, among whom are the brothers Cyril and Methodius. In the 9^th century they created an alphabet to translate the Bible into the Slavic languages. During roughly that period another missionary, St. Adalbert, worked to bring the Gospel to the people in Central Europe. The many years of Ottoman oppression, and atheist communist totalitarianism, were not able to eradicate Christianity from Bulgaria, nor from any other country in Central Europe.

It is only the Gospel which can affect individuals and society as a whole in order to bring them back from a place of hatred and darkness to freedom and respect for human dignity. What God did for us in Jesus Christ, we cannot do for ourselves. Therefore, all the expressions in society of that helplessness to fight our own nature must be enlightened by our strife to love God and love our neighbor, the greatest commandments in the Christian faith.

In a strange way the recent totalitarian Soviet empire’s grip on the countries of Central and Eastern Europe somehow made the connection between the Central European peoples vital and necessary. Communist statism produced a paradox – it became more desirable to speak in English and to people from the free world than to our own neighbors.

We were bound by “internationalist socialist ideals.” Yet we were more interested in the US democratic principles and culture, than in our Romanian neighbors, living under the oppressive regime of Ceausescu. Our peoples were “united” by the same evil and godless regimes, treating men as only a corporate biological mass for the fulfillment of some utopian future while living in a hellish dystopia.

Besides offering salvation and life through the God of the Bible, Christianity has been fundamental to the formation of European civilization. There are, certainly, differences in the Christian practices influencing the various Central European countries. Some are influenced by Roman Catholicism, others by Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and there is a strong Protestant-evangelical presence in many of these nations. These differences are tied to possibly differing political views and practices. However, the Biblical practice of Christianity is based on eternal fundamentals recorded in the Scriptures. It does not distinguish based on politics but based on good and evil, righteousness and wickedness, forgiveness and revenge, truth and deception, on the moral and immoral, on the sacred and profane, on the temporary and eternal. From that higher ground we esteem politics, law, economics, art, and culture. If we do not have the ties of preference for eternal values of good v. evil, we will be swayed by utilitarian uses of the elements of material life and world. And that is the danger that we are facing again.

In that picture, the protection of the traditional family, as well as human sexuality, as created and ordained by God, is paramount for the survival of our nations and civilization at large. The current attacks on the family come not only through the extreme ideology of politicization of sexuality which is pushed transnationally. The destruction of national sovereignty, under the guise of striving for international unity, is the door to the destruction of the country, the family and hence – the person. Traditional human rights, worked out in a more sane, less radical era, when the generations were not the victims of imagined suffering and want, are now being exchanged for the new radical social engineering rights of sexual orientation, transgenderism, the abandonment of biological and normal family and a movement toward transhumanism.

The old dream of the tower of Babel seems to have possessed those institutions that promised a brotherhood of nations. How ironic and how predictable. History repeats itself.

Communism violently convinces people that there is no God, that man is just a better developed animal, that conscience is imaginary and the concepts of right and wrong always change, as the masters of the everlasting party change. What should unite the nations of Central Europe toward a common future is not only the memories and the trauma of the morally corrupt regimes of atheist communism, but also the danger of sleepwalking into new forms of assault against freedom and human dignity.

The family and personal privacy are protected as a fundamental human right under the European Convention. However, lately certain decisions of the European Court of Human Rights have put into question the very capacity of the court, or at least part of it, to judge the facts and the law properly. Bulgaria has been the subject of intense political pressure to recognize that sex[2] is a social construct, based on sexual orientation, or sexual preference. Recently, a lesbian couple who had concluded a “marriage” outside of Bulgaria obtained a decision from the European Court of Human Rights to have their illegal marriage recognized by Bulgarian institutions and society.[3] Activists are using cases like this to eventually impose same-sex marriage on nations whose constitution and traditions reject it.

We have a common history, we have similar languages, we have suffered under totalitarianism, and we are neighbors. The Christian command of “love your neighbor as yourself” applies to individuals but also to nations.

The future of Central Europe is impossible without the establishment of human rights as a tool to defend human dignity and the family. We cannot go back to the dark corners of totalitarian abuse of justice and secular power. However, man’s dignity and freedom must be re-established in the light of the Christian Gospel – give to Caesar what is his and to God what is God’s. The state and centralized governance must give way to the voice and the will of the people, who on their behalf, have not only rights but duty to God and their fellow man. If the state can redefine and control marriage, the family, and even gender, the state has decided to stand in the place of God.

The right to family privacy and protection from sexually politicized social engineering is a big step to the restoration of common sense. And for that we must trust and build each other through observing the greatest commandments in personal life and in our nations – love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

The family stands in opposition to social engineering as the smallest sovereign social unit. Jacques Ellul has said that the foundational inhibitor of tyranny is the family structure.[4] I am not referring to just any concept of “family” but the one that was established by the Creator from the beginning of creation (Genesis 1:27). “Male and female, He created them” are also the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, quoting the law of Moses.

The strongest connection we can have as Central Europeans is the defense of our essence as humans, created in God’s image. We must stand in defense of the traditional family between man and woman and the right of parents to raise their children.

In Conclusion

Spiritual Freedom. The communist regimes did attempt to create a semblance of international relations, but these were forced and never produced the true brotherhood that they claimed. You cannot truly love your neighbor if you deny the existence of God. Relational freedom is built on trust. We have a heritage given to us by missionaries like Cyril and Methodius and St. Adalbert, whose mission was to spread the Gospel.

I need to make a disclaimer here when I advocate for a Christian revival in Central Europe. I do not mean the resurrection of the heretical unification between the church of God and Caesar, between the spiritual message and secular ideology. We know the failures in history to envision the kingdoms of this world as the kingdoms of God, built in the name of man.

Personal and Family Freedom. Central Europeans are sensitive toward any limitation of those freedoms which were denied us for half a century – the freedom to think, to speak, to travel, to live with dignity and the freedom to believe in God. We know what a departure from reality looks like. We know how a godless ideology is able to deny the past, distort the present and steal the future. While we can be active members of the experiment called “the European Union,” we should not look to our Western partners just because of their economic prosperity and financial prowess.

I do not speak of some empty appeal to national pride, but of the ethical and spiritual value that comes with suffering. Not all is money, and not all is about competitive achievements.

We have this common sensitivity against ideologies which appear to be benevolent but have a sinister aim. We must defend the traditional family and push back against any attempt to deprive our nations of their individual sovereignty in the name of some global vision of a man created in the image of an elite class. The first task toward a closer unity of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe is defending our common freedom, including the rights of parents and the traditional family.

[1] https://globalextremism.org/bulgaria/

[2] Even the term “sex” denoting human sexuality as male or female has evolved in the English language to depict the act of copulation, or performing acts that aim to achieve sexual pleasure, as in “having sex,” while the original Medieval origin is likely derived from the Latin “sexus” also akin to “division.”

[3] ЕСПЧ се произнесе по казуса на Лилия Бабулкова и Дарина Коилова за признаване у нас на техния брак (frognews.bg)

[4] Jacques Ellul (/ɛˈluːl/; French: [ɛlyl]; January 6, 1912 – May 19, 1994) was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and professor. Noted as a Christian anarchist, Ellul was a longtime Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux (from Wikipedia).