March 11, 2026. Lithuania celebrates 36 years of freedom from a system that used state institutions to enforce ideological conformity. That same week, a group of MPs filed bills to embed a single ideological vision of family into every classroom in the country. Months earlier, in January, the Justice Vice-Minister was in Madrid defending the “natural family” at a conservative Christian conference under her official title. That same month, the president of Ordo Iuris was welcomed into the Seimas by the Justice Minister herself. Eight weeks later, the bills arrived. None of this is coincidence. It is a sequence.

The Bills

On March 9, 2026  a group of MPs from the Lithuanian Peasants, Greens and Polish Christian Families Alliance registered three bills (XVP-1270–1272) proposing amendments to the Education, National Broadcasting, and Cultural Policy Laws. The stated aim: address demographic decline. The actual mechanism: embed “matrimonial family” as the foundational basis of education, mandate “Christian values” in school curricula, and grant parents a formal right to opt their children out of sexuality education entirely.

The bills are not fringe. They are the affirmative legislative expression of a formal coalition commitment: the Peasants, Greens and Christian Families Alliance faction formally committed in the current coalition agreement not to support legislation legalising civil partnerships, same-sex marriage, or sexuality education programmes. These bills are the other side of that same coin, not passive opposition to progress, but active legislative reversal of it.

If passed, children raised by same-sex parents, whose families Lithuania’s own Constitutional Court has already recognised as constitutionally protected, would find those families erased from the educational framework their taxes fund. LGBTQ+ young people would be legally exposed to parental opt-outs that remove the only institutional space where they might encounter language for their own experience.

The Transnational Connection

The bills do not emerge from a vacuum. On January 14, 2026,  weeks before the education bills were filed, Lithuania’s Seimas hosted an international conference titled “Demographic Challenges and Family Policy,” organised by the Temporary Family Policy Group of the Seimas and the Social Initiatives Forum “Family 2050.”

The keynote speaker was Jerzy Kwaśniewski, president of Ordo Iuris,  the Polish ultra-conservative legal organisation that has been the central architect of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns across Central and Eastern Europe. At the conference, he framed the demographic crisis in explicitly civilisational terms and presented a draft International Convention on the Rights of the Family,  a document designed to embed heteronormative family definitions into international law, directly countering ECtHR and CJEU jurisprudence.

On the sidelines, Kwaśniewski met with Justice Minister Rita Tamašunienė,  co-signatory of the education bills filed eight weeks later. He described the meeting on social media as “warm”, summarising its outcome as: “stop liberal attacks on marriage and family culture, stop liberals altogether.”

The sequence is direct: Ordo Iuris meets Lithuania’s Justice Minister in January. Eight weeks later, bills embedding “matrimonial family” and “Christian values” into education law land in parliament. The ideological infrastructure and the legislative output are connected, and the participants from Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Latvia, and Ukraine at that January conference map almost precisely onto the geography of active anti-gender legislative movements across the region.

The Vice-Minister of Justice Who Thinks Equality Is the Problem

The bills do not exist in isolation. They arrive alongside the tenure of Justice Vice-Minister Kristina Zamarytė-Sakavičienė, appointed in October 2025, a figure whose record on LGBTQ+ rights is extensive, consistent, and on the public record.

In June 2014, she published an article titled “Sorry, but homosexual relationships do not create a family” on bernardinai.lt (archived version). In it, she argued that homosexuality represents a dysfunction of the reproductive system, comparing it to alcoholism and oncological illness, and suggesting that homosexual persons have “psychological needs” that prevent them from creating a family in the natural sense. The article explicitly framed homosexuality as a correctable condition, stating that conversion methods exist and that activists are wrong to discourage them.

In 2022, the Lithuanian Journalist Ethics Inspectorate found that the republication of that text violated the Law on the Provision of Information to the Public, specifically provisions prohibiting the dissemination of content that demeans people on the basis of sexual orientation.

Her views did not moderate with time. In 2024, she stated publicly: “Two persons of the same sex cannot have children together. Therefore, the state should not consider such unions a family, and thus should not encourage or nurture them. Only the blind cannot see that democracy is turning into manipulation, seeking to impose LGBTQ+ ideology on all of Lithuania, a fanatical religion alien to us, with new dogmas and stereotypes.”

As recently as August 2025, just two months before her appointment as Vice-Minister, she stated that a lesbian woman “can be a good mother, but cannot be a father”, and that children need both a mother and a father for complete personality development. Her appointment in October 2025 drew immediate and broad criticism from politicians across party lines, legal experts, and civil society organisations.

Madrid Speech: “Alarming Equality”

In January 2026, Vice-Minister Zamarytė-Sakavičienė travelled to Madrid to speak at a conference organised by a conservative Christian institution promoting the “natural family”, defined explicitly as the union of a man and a woman. She was introduced to the audience as Lithuania’s Justice Vice-Minister throughout the event, and was subsequently listed as such when her speech was published on lrt.lt.

In her address, she characterised the principle of gender equality, enshrined in both Lithuanian and EU law – as producing an “alarming tendency”: in her words, contemporary politics and courts are erasing “the boundaries between the natural, marriage-bound family of a man and a woman and various other forms of cohabitation.”

Lithuania’s Justice Vice-Minister, speaking under her official title at an international conference, told a conservative Christian audience that constitutional equality is a problem to be resisted.

The Broader Pattern

This is not a collection of isolated incidents. It is a coordinated political environment in which:

• Lithuania’s courts have delivered three consecutive landmark rulings expanding LGBTQ+ rights and recognition: Macatė v. Lithuania (ECtHR, 2023), the “gay propaganda” ruling (Constitutional Court, December 2024), and the civil partnership ruling (Constitutional Court, April 2025)
• The legislative and executive response has been to file curriculum bills that directly invert that jurisprudence, and to appoint to justice oversight a person who has publicly characterised homosexuality as a medical disorder and equality as an alarming tendency
• The person overseeing justice policy argued as recently as 2024 that LGBTQ+ identity represents a “fanatical religion alien to Lithuania”, language that would be considered hate speech in many EU jurisdictions

What is new, and what makes this moment particularly dangerous, is the active, coordinated use of both legislative and executive power to push back against judicial progress, framed in the language of demographics, values, and parental rights.

The Constitutional Court has been unambiguous: family is gender-neutral under the Constitution; restricting children’s access to information about real social relations harms their development; prejudice cannot justify limiting fundamental rights. A Justice Vice-Minister who finds equality alarming and MPs who want to write the heteronormative family into education law are not engaging in a legitimate values debate. They are using public office to resist constitutional obligations, and doing so in the week Lithuania celebrates the freedom it fought for.

What Needs to Happen

Lithuania’s civil society, legal community, and European partners need to name this pattern clearly and respond to it on multiple simultaneous fronts.

The education bills (XVP-1270–1272) must be scrutinised for constitutional compliance, specifically against the Constitutional Court’s rulings on the gender-neutral concept of family and children’s right to comprehensive development. The Seimas Legal Department, the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee, and the Office of the Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson all have standing to assess these bills before they advance.

The Vice-Minister’s record, from the 2014 article comparing homosexuality to alcoholism, through her 2024 statements calling LGBTQ+ rights a “fanatical religion,” to her January 2026 Madrid speech characterising equality as alarming, raises a serious question of institutional fitness that the Minister of Justice, who is herself a co-signatory of the education bills, has not addressed.

And on a day when Lithuania marks 36 years of independence from a system that used state institutions to enforce ideological conformity, it is worth asking whose freedom is being celebrated, and whose is still being legislated away.