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The vote in the Renew Europe group was in response to a video by Mr. Uspaskich in which politicians used the words “perverts” and “pedicures.”
Dacian Ciolos, the Romanian politician and president of Renew Europe, said the content of the video was completely unacceptable, hateful and clearly homophobic.
72 MEPs voted in favor of the removal of Uspaskich, six against and six abstentions.
Mr. Uspaskich sent a letter of apology to his group colleagues last week. He acknowledged that the words used were too rude, but assured that he did not seek to offend the LGBT community, and accused political opponents and the media of providing biased information.
Uspaskich posted the scandalous comments earlier this month in a live feed on Facebook.
“Today, in some European countries, it is even dangerous to say that you are a representative of the natural orientation. I don’t want my conversations, the program, to be commented on by pediatricians of all kinds, because it is not a program for them anyway. I mean pedicures, perverts, those to whom fate, life has given so much, it is not their fault that there is some kind of longing for a man to feel with his clothes as a woman. Most of these people don’t advertise, but the ones who put the granite under their skirts and go out on the street scream, they are pedicures, perverts and those things really should not be tolerated, ”said V. Uspaskich during the broadcast.
There is no place for homophobia
After the vote, the group’s president, Mr. Ciolos, emphasized that the political group was committed to “protecting and expanding” the rights of LGBT + people.
“There is no place for homophobia in the Renew Europe family,” he said.
Petras Auštrevičius MEP, who voted in favor of Uspaskich’s vote, said the political group had stated that it would “continue to defend its convictions and build a tolerant European society, with equal opportunities and rights.”
European MEPs Aušra Maldeikienė, a faction member of the European People’s Party, and the Freedom Faction of the Lithuanian Seimas drew the attention of European liberals to V. Uspaskich’s speeches on social media.
The group’s president, Ieva Pakarklytė, welcomed the decision of the MEPs. He said that Uspaskich’s statements were “a clear example of incitement to hatred under the guise of freedom of expression.” Tomas Vytautas Raskevičius, a member of the faction that does not hide homosexuality, stated that “the humiliation of individual groups in society and their stigmatization is incompatible with the principles of liberal democracy and respect for human dignity.”
In a letter of explanation, Uspaskich said the comments were directed only at the people who insulted him and not at the entire LGBT community. He promised to formulate his speeches more correctly in the future.
In a two-page letter in English, V. Uspaskich said that in Lithuania he often receives unwarranted attacks and insults from political opponents due to his Russian origin and suffers from Russophobic moods.
V. Uspaskich claimed that his language extract could give a false impression because the intonation was not clear to him, furthermore, he claimed that he could have made a mistake in choosing words because Lithuanian was not his mother tongue.
BNS was unable to reach Uspaskich on Wednesday.
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