Justice Minister Ján Čarnogurský has refused to contemplate changes in the law to allow Slovak homosexuals to marry.
The problem is that Slovakia has applied to join the European Union, and there is no room in the EU for any country, however small, which hasn't granted full emancipation and human rights to so-called gays. Does Mr. Čarnogurský know something which the rest of us don't - although one or two of us have our suspicions - which is that this country will never join the Union because the French and Germans, and possibly the Austrians, can't stand the idea of job competition from the untermenschen? If that is indeed the case, the Justice Minister and everyone else can continue to sound off with a wide range of illiberal views and no-one outside Slovakia will give a toss.
The wonder is that there are any homosexuals in Slovakia at all. The ladies are so wondrously put together here that there can't possibly be any solid reason for a man to look at another man with lust in his mind.
Last week I went to Croatia for a short time. Three days. It may be the only holiday I get this year. I stayed in the usual village on the coast and tried to learn Croat. It used to be called Serbo-Croat but not anymore. Fortunately, I had little contact with the outside world, and missed the first few days of the Russian submarine disaster. However, I did get a call from a policeman friend of mine who pretended to be interested in knowing where I'd hired my car so he could rent one himself.
He heightened my suspicion that this was not just a routine call, as they say, but had a purpose in mind other than knowing about cheap and reliable Škoda rentals by saying he'd been asked by Scotland Yard to keep a tab on my movements. It might have been he was miffed at not being asked along for the ride, but if I'd wanted companionship I'd have invited someone more curvaceous than Superintendent Rogers. But he does look great when he's playing football, I have to say. Super pecs.
Preparations for the Colin Currie soccer tournament in Prague next month are well under way, and the practice games every Sunday out at Devín Castle are great fun. The team of 11 represents 12 nationalities, including my Serbo-Indonesian friend C. Hopper, and it's a happy sight indeed to witness this international crew of cops, spooks, and money-launderers strut their stuff. If any readers would like to come along to watch the spectacle kick-off is usually about 14 hundred hours as they say in the police, and we usually get together before and after at an Irish Pub in the centre of town.
Now, of course, all the Russian submariners are dead and Putin doesn't give a damn. It's sad that it takes a tragedy like the sinking of the Kursk for the world to find out what sort of a man is Putin. No-one seemed to care very much when a British newspaper linked his KGB successor organisation to the attempted bombing of an apartment building in Russia a few weeks after two buildings were destroyed in Moscow, allegedly by Chechen rebels. But maybe the lesson's been learned now with the loss of another 118 lives.
Life is cheap, but free speech is precious.
