False Conservatism, Cameron-Style: Why the Right Cannot Support Civil Partnerships

The struggle to preserve the special status of marriage in Poland’s legal and social order is especially difficult today—not only because the opponents of the natural order hold a parliamentary majority and are in power, but also because they are trying to manipulate society. In the past, plans to introduce so-called same-sex “marriages” were masked with calls to institutionalize civil partnerships, which were supposedly something entirely different from marriage. Today the same solutions are being covered with new slogans—their aim is to play on the sensibilities of Poles so as to weaken their readiness to defend the fundamental institution of social life.

But that is not all. The Deputy Minister of Digital Affairs, Krzysztof Gawkowski, author of the regulation permitting the transcription of same-sex “marriage” certificates contracted abroad—which has just been struck down by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal—has announced that he will not respect that ruling. We are dealing with people who, before they bear political responsibility for their actions, may seriously harm public order in our country.

The veto: no surprise

On July 17, 2026, President Karol Nawrocki vetoed the Act on the Status of the Closest Person in a Relationship and the Cohabitation Agreement, together with its accompanying introductory provisions, which amended several hundred other statutes. Following this expected decision, the ruling camp sought to stir up a political storm by injecting well-worn and much-rehearsed notes into the debate. Prime Minister Donald Tusk spoke of “contempt for people and their right to happiness”, while politicians of the Left (Lewica) called the veto a “disgrace”.

Despite these almost caricatural reactions, the matter is important and serious, even if in recent days it has been overshadowed by day-to-day politics and by such events as the turmoil surrounding the split within Law and Justice (PiS) and, in part, the ongoing scandal at the Southern Hospital (Szpital Południowy) in Warsaw. Although both of these issues arouse great emotion today, their significance, though not trivial, is limited. Meanwhile, the new legislation—intended to provide a framework and a state-legitimized social constitution—would, if adopted, likely spoil Polish life for many years to come.

Diverting attention

After the presidential veto, it is worth recalling that in this matter the government—represented chiefly by Minister Katarzyna Kotula, but also by other representatives of the ruling coalition and by opinion-makers sympathetic to it—consistently deployed in its propaganda campaign arguments designed to disorient the public. It is obvious that people who can be identified with the most radical supporters of the current authorities need no arguments at all. It is enough for them that a legislative project comes from the camp of their political leader, or that it can be treated as anti-PiS—and now also anti-presidential. Yet the messaging around the “closest person” law was evidently formatted with a view to broad groups of citizens who make up the socially moderate, conservative center.

They are often less interested in the details of public life, which does not mean they are insensitive to the slogans that appear in political rhetoric. That is why the law in question was given the name “closest person,” even though in many respects it resembles an earlier bill meant to introduce quasi-marriages, that is, civil partnerships. The aim was to evoke certain associations in the widest possible part of the public, including those who may already have formed a negative opinion of the earlier proposals put forward by sexual-minority circles and the politicians who support them. That is why a bill meant to make same-sex unions legally resemble marriage was reduced to the heart-softening question of whether people close to one another can visit each other in hospitals.

For that is what this is really about. Although we have heard, and still hear, that the vetoed legislation is for everyone who forms an informal relationship, not for a single group, and that its proposals have nothing to do with marriage—let alone a so-called same-sex “marriage”—the parallel effort to push through in our country the transcription of certificates of such unions contracted abroad flatly contradicts this reassuring story. Let us add that the same people are responsible both for spinning these lulling narratives and for simultaneously carrying out a legal revolution.

Misusing legal terminology

Equally manipulative is the element of the political legend according to which the “closest person status act” seeks to close a supposedly existing legal gap. It plainly suggested the need to supplement the law with norms regulating an existing state of affairs. The abuse here consists in juxtaposing—and suggesting equality between—informal sexual relationships, even relatively lasting ones, between persons of the same or opposite sex, and the constitutionally privileged natural institution that is marriage. In light of Polish law and the case law of the Republic’s highest courts, the differences between a “union” and a “marriage” are fundamental, and these two realities cannot be equated.

Poland’s Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the absence of statutory regulation of non-marital unions is not an oversight by the legislature but results from a deliberate decision by the framers of the Constitution and reflects the hierarchy of social goods they adopted. The Supreme Court had already taken this position in its rulings of 2007, 2011, and 2012, and it confirmed it again in its opinion of January 26, 2026 concerning the bills discussed here. The government simply chose to ignore this consistent line of case law of the highest judicial body and to reinterpret constitutional law in Poland by force. Invoking Article 32 of the Constitution—which sets out the principle of equality—in order to undermine the significance of Article 18 is at odds with the settled position of the Supreme Court, which pointed out that the special status and privileges belonging to marriage “cannot be challenged by invoking other provisions of the Constitution, in particular Article 32.”

For the principle of equality does not mean an obligation to treat all subjects identically; rather, it requires that entities in a similar situation be treated alike, and those that differ in a significant way be treated differently. Marriage and informal unions of individuals—all the more so of the same sex—belong, to repeat, to different categories, because they are distinguished by a fundamental feature bound up with their character and social function.

Contrary to the justifications presented by the government side, the bill did not fill any significant gap in the everyday functioning of people who live outside marriage. Health, property, inheritance, and banking matters have for years been able to be secured by them within the existing rules—including by people living in civil partnerships, same-sex ones included.

Social consequences

The bill created a model of a union deliberately stripped of the features characteristic of marriage as a lasting community of life, yet at the same time endowed with the privileges belonging to marriage. It provided for no presumption of the relationship’s stability, allowing it to be ended unilaterally by a mere declaration made before a notary. Instead of a duty of fidelity, it introduced the more general and far more flexible criteria of “loyalty and respect.” For the state to grant similar entitlements to unions of an entirely different character—both lasting and, by design, easily dissolvable, based on exclusivity as well as on an open model—leads to a weakening of the importance of values such as fidelity, responsibility, and the durability of bonds.

At the same time, the bill would entail measurable financial costs for the state—connected, for instance, with administering the new rules and their administrative consequences—which would grow in subsequent years. It is estimated that in the tenth year the cost of the law would already reach 2.372 billion zloty. It is also hard to point to proportionate social benefits that would justify such interference in the legal system and the incurring of additional, high public expenditure—even assuming that it would not be only homosexuals who would benefit from the new legislation. And for the state system that is one important piece of data. Yet whom this law is tailored for is easy to infer from the fact that the vetoed law does not address the good of the child at all, which is one of the fundamental principles of the Family and Guardianship Code. This is not about any children—at least not until the question of adoption by same-sex couples is raised.

From a demographic perspective, too, civil partnerships offer society no advantage. Demographic research consistently indicates that marriages are more pro-natal. According to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of married people aged 18–44 are raising children, whereas among couples living together without marriage the figure is 54 percent. The difference is even greater for shared biological children: 70 percent among married couples versus 35 percent among cohabiting couples.

Sociologists also point out that a lasting marriage remains the primary environment for parenthood, and that children raised by biological parents in a stable marriage on average achieve better developmental and educational outcomes than their peers raised in less stable forms of family life. The fact that marriages, too, break down is no argument here—marriage will still remain a more durable reality than unions that are unstable by design. Encouraging marriage and strengthening existing marriages is therefore in the well-understood interest of the state.

The problem of conservatism

Finally, it is worth addressing an argument that for years functioned entirely on the margins of the debate but has recently been brought closer to its center by one of the commentators of Gazeta Wyborcza. It holds that the institutionalization of same-sex unions would be a fundamentally conservative act. The author quotes former British Prime Minister David Cameron who, after same-sex unions in England were raised to the rank of marriage, said: “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.”

Cameron’s reasoning arose from the specific character of English conservatism, which was always an intellectual and political form of defending the interests of the British elites and had little to do with the search for more universal principles of a good society. It was always a doctrine of protecting a particular understanding of social stability, in whose name it also declared a readiness to normalize phenomena unacceptable from the standpoint of an objective moral norm or of natural law. Although one may think fondly of the “father of conservatism,” Edmund Burke, as a critic of the ideas that set the French Revolution in motion, he was at the same time essentially detached from the principles of natural law. He was, after all, himself a child of revolution—only an English one: Henrician, Cromwellian, or Elizabethan.

Yet the very invocation of conservatism by a commentator in the matter discussed above reveals a certain problem with it. Time and again, human societies “conserve” utterly and dramatically bad customs and laws. Today, in many countries, it is the abortionists who are the “conservatives,” while pro-lifers occupy revolutionary and progressive positions, positions of change. The Gazeta Wyborcza author writes that President Nawrocki’s stance is populist. What does that actually mean? Essentially nothing; it is the same kind of invective as calling one’s political opponents fascists, say.

One may, however, view the commentator’s words as the classism and contempt for the common people and the nation typical of the Gazeta Wyborcza milieu. For populism is a readiness to represent the foundational opinion within a given community—one that need not even be statistically dominant, but may be essential to the tradition of a given state and the society that constitutes it. Or simply to social needs and expectations. It has long been known that, for the “conservatives” of Wyborcza, ordinary people are rather something that inspires disgust.

Tomasz Rowiński is a senior research fellow in the “Ordo Iuris: Civilization” project of the Ordo Iuris Institute, an editor of Christianitas, an editor of the Afirmacja.info portal, a historian of ideas, a commentator, and an author of books; his publications include Bękarty Dantego. Szkice o zanikaniu i odradzaniu się widzialnego chrześcijaństwa (“Dante’s Bastards: Sketches on the Disappearance and Rebirth of Visible Christianity”), Królestwo nie z tego świata. O zasadach Polski katolickiej na podstawie wydarzeń nowszych i dawniejszych (“A Kingdom Not of This World: On the Principles of Catholic Poland in Light of Recent and Older Events”), Turbopapiestwo. O dynamice pewnego kryzysu (“Turbo-Papacy: On the Dynamics of a Certain Crisis”), and Anachroniczna nowoczesność. Eseje o cywilizacji przemocy (“Anachronistic Modernity: Essays on the Civilization of Violence”). He lives in Książenice near Grodzisk Mazowiecki.

See also:

• Act on Same-Sex Civil Partnerships Adopted by the Polish Sejm: Time for President Nawrocki’s Veto
• Poland’s Constitution Does Not Allow the Transcription of Foreign Same-Sex Marriage Certificates, Says Ordo Iuris Opinion for the Constitutional Tribunal
• Polish Court’s Judgment on Same-Sex Marriage Record—An Unconstitutional Capitulation to EU Ideologues
• Rewriting Rights? The ECHR’s Shift Away from the European Convention’s Text on Same-Sex Unions, Immigration, and the Judiciary
• Apparent Equality, Real Destruction. On the Consequences of Institutionalizing Informal Partnerships

Source of cover photo: iStock