Slovak MP, former Interior Minister and head of the Christian Democrats of Slovakia party Vladimír Palko has weighed in on this development with a brief opinion piece published in three languages at La Voce della Slovacchia, a primarily Italian-language news outlet on the Slovak scene. The piece is entitled “Gay marches end in tyranny“. Yes, you read that right.

The homosexual lobby wants to achieve a situation where the homosexual lifestyle is respected by the majority society as something normal and natural.

I’m unsure, myself, what the “homosexual lobby” seeks to achieve in Slovakia. But if it includes this, I support it whole-heartedly. Because what we have in the meanwhile is a situation where it’s considered “normal” and “natural” to hate anyone operating outside the religio-culturally prescribed heterosexual model, and act accordingly toward them.

Palko then explains the “tyranny” he wants his readers to fear is coming, that they might grant him and his cronies more power:

I will mention the example of Judge Andrew McClintock from Sheffield, who lost his judges robes because he did not wish to preside over cases where he would by law have to award guardianship of children to a homosexual couple. Another example is the employee of City Hall in London, Lilian Ladele, who will no longer be able to do her job as wedding registrar, because she had a problem with her conscience in “marrying” homosexual couples.

So, what Palko wants those who read his screed to fear is that government workers will be “tyrannized”. Awwwww! It makes me want to go run right out and give the nearest police officer a great big hug.

As long as issues such as sexual orientation and marriage are to fall under the baneful gaze of states, it should be clear to anyone, Palko included, that the only proper function of the government employees handling them is to simply carry out the law impartially. And if they can’t handle that, fine, let them go out and get into an honest line of work instead.

This interview was published, in Slovak, by Markíza Magazine on 2 July 2009.

The English text here is a loose back-translation of the Slovak text of the published article, which is available at mojacasopis.sk.

This is a translation of a translation of my own interview responses, and a bunch of things inevitably get lost in such a process. In a couple of cases, I’ve footnoted things that I feel I ought to clarify, but, with that, the text:

Verbal Aspect Bothers Me!

Text: Ľuba Kukučková – Photo: Oles Cheresko

Mike Gogulski has a Polish surname, was born an American and today is a citizen of no state. He has worked in the USA and in Belgium. Lately, he’s dropped anchor in Slovakia and has been living in Bratislava for five years.

At the old Slovak National Theater in Bratislava. Photo: Oles Cheresko, Markíza

To the east, he’s been as far as Košice, Guatemala to the south and Vancouver, Canada to the northwest. He doesn’t feel like a globetrotter, and he’s very pleased to be in Bratislava!

Mike’s paternal grandparents emigrated to America at the start of the 1900s. His mother’s ancestors came from Germany. Most of today’s Gogulskis live in the area of Poznań, Poland, but Mike doesn’t know them personally. Like many European emigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, his ancestors, too, wanted to break their bonds with their motherland and become Americans. They had difficult lives, too, and there remained no time to preserve the Polish language and culture for their children. But now their great-grandchild has come back to Europe after all. He speaks four languages and, thanks to his spontaneous approach to people, has made many friends in Slovakia. In this way, he might be called a true world citizen. Mike Gogulski, however, has no citizenship. He renounced his American citizenship, and for the moment is only considering becoming a Slovak citizen…

School, LSD and Beer

Michael was born on 8 August 1972 in Phoenix, Arizona. His father got a job as an electro-mechanical engineer in Orlando, Florida, and there Mike lived with his family until he was 25 years old. Afterward, he roamed a number of states following jobs, from Minnesota to Connecticut and from California to Wisconsin. Eight years ago, his father died of cancer. His mother, Joan, lives in Florida. Mike’s younger sister, Karen, who works as a nurse, is raising two adorable boys – Cole and Chase – in Orlando with her husband, Billy. Mike sees his nephews only in photos, though. “In 1990 I started studying information technology at a university in Orlando, but then my interest shifted to LSD and beer,” he openly confesses. He quit his studies after the first semester. But he’s found his footing in life quite successfully. He has a ten-year information systems career behind him as a systems administrator, network engineer and IT infrastructure manager. He moved around a large area of the western parts of the US after work.

In 2004, in the wake of many work as well as personal expectations and failures, Mike left America. His girlfriend at the time wanted to teach English in a European country, someplace in the eastern bloc. She sent out inquiries and got a response from right here in Slovakia. They both moved to Bratislava and, though their paths parted later, Mike became fond of Bratislava. Since 2006 he’s begun devoting himself more to language, rather than to computers as in the past. He has become a translator, proofreader and editor.

Slovaks are Quieter

“Bratislava has its good and less-good sides,” the American native muses. “I never lived right in the city in the past, in the US. I thought that I’d hate the city, but that’s not so. I find living here pleasant. I like that Bratislava is small enough to offer a peaceful life while being big enough to have everything you’d expect from a city.” He has friends, lovers, ex-lovers as well as enemies here… He has been to Žilina, Košice, Prešov, Banská Bystrica and Zvolen. He has heard that Slovakia is a beautiful land and looks forward to discovering it over time. Does he sometimes compare Slovaks to Americans? To Mike, good and bad people are found everywhere. As a matter of principle, however, he judges people as individual beings, not as members of some group based on place of birth or the geographical divisions of the world. Mike believes that Slovaks, in general, are quieter than Americans. He’s had some awkward moments, though, with the hazards of Slovak. He’d been in Slovakia barely three months when he approached a group of girls at work with whom he often went to smoke outside the building. He asked: “Would you like to smoke?” And they took this a bit differently… They stopped laughing after a bit and explained the sexual undertone* of the question.

At one time he defended his trouble with the language by saying, “my Slovak is good enough for taxi drivers and waiters,” but since then he’s improved dramatically. He reads well in Slovak, in his humble appraisal, writes like a respectable schoolboy but has trouble, though, understanding responses in conversation. He works as a translator, and so he hasn’t mastered slang; he says his Slovak is more lawyerly. Really understanding a language demands growing up in the country. “I didn’t want to live in some sort of isolated bubble with other Americans and English-speaking people,” Mike says. “I would have felt cut off from reality. Many Slovaks say that Slovak is one of the most difficult languages in the world, but I don’t think so. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy. I took two years of Latin in school, so Slovak declension didn’t surprise me. Still, I’m not good at recalling when and how I should use the various cases. And the hardest thing for me – and perhaps for many westerners who come to Slavic lands – is verbal aspect. I want a magic key that would make it clear for me when to use the perfective aspect, but no such key exists!”

Mike is “Polyamorous”

Besides working with Slovak, Mike also translates official documents from Czech into English. He has simplified his lifestyle, and so he’s also living off smaller earnings. If he travels to the Czech Republic, he gets by in Slovak, and says the local people there observe him with interest. He once spoke Spanish very well, but has forgotten a lot. He believes, however, that if he traveled for a month to Spain or Mexico he would speak fluently by the third week. Though he behaves like a world citizen, he hasn’t traveled that much more of it. “In the US I moved from city to city every two years. I have been as far east as Košice, as far south as Guatemala, and as far north and west as Vancouver, Canada. I have been satisfied living here in Bratislava, and I don’t have any urge to move someplace else soon.” Mike got married in the US at 23, but the marriage lasted for only six years. From the marriage he has a nine-year-old daughter, Kyra, who lives with her mother in Georgia. Nobody from his family has visited him in Bratislava yet, though maybe they will come when his nephews grow up. Is he sad to be alone? “No. These days I am polyamorous (author’s note: in love with more than one person) and I’m not interested in an everlasting relationship of the marriage type.”**

Why did Mike renounce his American citizenship? “In its political, governmental essence, the USA appears to be a criminal organization. I don’t want to be connected with it in any way. I’m not against supporting society, but I am against taxes, which the state criminally demands of me from birth, and I don’t want to support others’ privileges. For me, ridding myself of citizenship was a way to bring my legal and social status into harmony with my beliefs. Perhaps later I will apply for Slovak citizenship, but that will be only for practical reasons, so that I can travel. I don’t want to have any sort of connection with the criminal organization known as the state. And, perhaps, I will not be a citizen of any country until the end of my life.”

* The Slovak verb fajčiť means, literally, “to consume by smoking”, as by smoking a cigarette. In slang it also means “to perform fellatio”.

** My actual words: “These days I am openly polyamorous, and not interested in a state marriage of any kind.”

Let’s picture the citizen/state relationship, for the sake of discussion, as a marriage. You fell in love when you were young and impressionable and decided to get hitched. For the sake of linguistic convenience, let’s have you be the wife, the citizen, and the state the husband.

After your honeymoon and as time goes by in your marriage, you notice some things are decidedly wrong about your husband. For one thing, his history is really quite different from how he described it before you got married. The more you learn about what your husband did in the past, the more doubt you have in the notion that he is really a good person. How could the one you love have done such awful things? How could he wrap his past crimes up in fancy language and present them as virtues? You try to ask your husband about these things, and if you are not met with stony silence or cold dismissal all you get is a repeat of the same slide show and heavily edited home movies you’ve seen before, to the strains of triumphant music and accompanied by words that seek either to bury that terrible history or to change the meanings of the very words themselves. Sometimes you get slapped hard across the face. You have real doubts.

One day your husband comes home after a late night out with blood on his clothes. “What happened!” you cry. “Oh, I was handing out candy to the children in the neighborhood. Then I killed a man.” Why? Because the other man believed the wrong things, spoke out of line, failed to obey, resisted your husband’s commands and was trying to fight off your husband. “What was the fight about?” you ask. Turns out that your husband was trying to rob that other man, or force him into slavery, and he wasn’t too happy about it. It’s all okay for the moment — surely your husband wouldn’t do such things to you or your family now, would he? But still, the doubt grows: do I really want to be married to a robber and a murderer?

One day you realize that your husband in fact comes home every day fresh from killing and/or robbing someone. There always seem to be good reasons for the torture and the killings — or so dear hubby says — but there’s this nagging voice inside you that asks: how is he different from any other psychopathic mass murderer? Am I next?

You look back more deeply into your husband’s history and find and entire lifetime drenched in blood and clouded by lies. The horror runs so deep and is so pervasive! Sure, your husband may have performed a million good or neutral acts in his past, but there are thousands of incidents of such unrestrained barbarity that there never possibly could have been good intent behind them. You see a pattern.

And you wake up one morning — alone in your bed, as your restless husband never sleeps — and you realize you’ve been tricked. You recall, all at once, the times your husband has beat you, has tormented you about your own nature, has slandered you to the neighbors and has treated you as worthless. You note that he does no work himself, but regularly steals half of your paycheck before you have a chance to enjoy any of it. You see his bloody, murderous present in the context of his bloody, murderous history, and you wonder just what sort of monster you married. No matter: he is certainly not the man you imagined, nor the man he claims to be.

"I love you" by nubuck @ sxc.hu

You try to reform your husband, but he is recalcitrant; in fact, the beatings become even more severe when you do so. You try to enlist the help of neighbors and friends, but they all rebuff you, saying that your husband can’t possibly be an evil psychopath — after all, look at the millions of good things he’s done! You find few if any people that can see through the deception. You realize that your husband is the very embodiment of evil, and that you have been duped into believing him virtuous, duped into the marriage and lied to every day and through every one of his acts. You realize that your love was misplaced, as it was based on lies.

Clearly, it’s time for a divorce.

It is a sad fact of human existence that there are tendencies in our psychology where people who are victimized become bonded to and emotionally dependent on those who prey upon them. Battered person syndrome is one such, and Stockholm syndrome is another. I have known many people, largely women, who have gotten trapped in abusive relationships with the most despicable creatures. Worse than seeing their bruises or wounds, worse than crying with them, worse than knowing the agony of their pain is hearing them justify why they really ought to stay with the person closest to them and who causes them the greatest harm — for the children, for the house, for the money, to avoid looking like a failure in marriage, because what will the neighbors think, because a marriage is a gift from “God”, because they think themselves worthless, because maybe “this time” it will all work out for the best, etc. Trying to talk these poor souls out of such situations, especially when you care for them personally, is most often an exercise in bitter disappointment as you watch them again and again return for more and more abuse.

The one thing they really must do in order to save themselves is to sever the abusive relationship immediately: pack your things, leave the house, start a new life, get a divorce, never look back.

I’ve done the first few of those things, now it’s time for the next step. It is my intent to divorce the criminal enterprise which calls itself “The United States of America”. I will not remain bonded to evil voluntarily through the exercise of citizenship.

“The future of marriage in California should be determined among the 36 million residents of the State of California — not by the personal, closed-door deliberation of seven judges,” said Rev. Sam Rodriguez, Jr., an Advisory Board Member of the Alliance for Marriage Foundation.

Revered Sam is right, of course, but only partially. Marriage is something which should be determined among people, not forced upon them by government, be it by activist judges, uppity legislators or the diktat of majoritarian democracy. In fact, the marriage of any given two (or more) of California’s 36 million shouldn’t be a matter for the other 35,999,998 at all, and especially not one that’s going to be either supported or contested by the inhuman force of the State.

Nobody will offer that amendment, of course.