Bucharest, September 19, 2017
Photo: INQUAM Hundreds of organizations from across the country have united in the civic platform “Together,” which was officially announced on Friday, according to Romanian news agency AGERPRES. The platform aims to support a referendum in defense of the traditional family.
The platform consists of more than 1,000 non-governmental organizations and authority figures from throughout the country. “We want to neutrally demonstrate that Romanians can have a civil society, able to defend the values in which they believe and which they want to hand on to their children. The platform’s purpose is the protection of these values, and we will begin with the definition of the family,” explained the speaker for the National Committee for Civil Initiatives Anna Corina Secrieru.
The definition of the family as the “union between spouses” appeared in the Romanian constitution in 1991, adopted after the fall of the socialist regime. The need to define the family as the “union between a man and a woman” was acutely felt, and on May 9 this year the Romanian parliament overwhelmingly supported the civil initiative for amending the constitution with the given definition of family. If the Senate and President support parliament’s referendum, then a nationwide referendum will take place, the holding of which would actively contradict the European parliament.
Following the May 9 vote, 30 foreign embassies unanimously opposed the decision of the chamber of deputies. On May 11 they promulgated a joint declaration condemning the Romanian legislators’ decision, which was signed by 30 states and European Commission representatives.
“The Romanian political class must understand that it cannot ignore the desires of millions of Romanians demanding to change the definition of the institution of the family in the constitution. We have the definition of the civil code which says that a family is the union between a man and woman. Millions of Romanians signed for this definition to be written into the constitution. The only thing necessary is the organization of the referendum for all the people to be able to come and vote as their conscience dictates,” Secrieru added.
The Chairman of the National Committee for Civic Initiative Mihai Gheorghiu noted that many of the organizations in the platform are small, but they strongly defend the “values of the Romanian life:” “All these people have gathered together to say ‘Yes’ to the referendum for amending article 48, paragraph 1, of the Constitution... This is another signal that Romanian society wants this referendum and the constitutional change, and it wants that normality was the rule for our society and for the legal and constitutional system.”
