On 24 March 2026, a group of Lithuanian MPs – led by Ligita Girskienė, Vytautas Sinica and Audronius Ažubalis – registered a draft resolution proposing that a consultative referendum be held alongside the 2027 municipal elections, asking citizens whether they agree that Article 38 of the Constitution should explicitly state that “family legal relations arise only from the marriage of a man and a woman, motherhood and fatherhood.”

The initiators present this as an exercise in democratic participation, but its actual purpose is much narrower: to write same-sex couples and their children out of the constitutional concept of the family. It is worth recalling that the current Article 38 does not actually define what a family is – it only says that marriage is entered into by the free consent of a man and a woman, and that the family is “the basis of society and the State.” The substantive constitutional concept of the family has been developed over two decades by the Constitutional Court itself, which in its landmark ruling of 28 September 2011 held that the constitutional concept of the family “cannot be derived solely from the institution of marriage” and that family is grounded in the content of relationships, not their form.

The referendum initiative appeared not even a year after the Constitutional Court’s historic ruling of 17 April 2025 (Case No. KT21-N5/2025), which found that Article 3.229 of the Civil Code – restricting partnership to different-sex couples – was unconstitutional, and that the legislature’s 24-year failure to pass a partnership law had violated the principle of legal certainty. The Court explicitly stated that the Constitution does not permit lawmakers to enact rules that discriminate against participants in family relations on the basis of their sexual orientation, and opened the door for same-sex couples to apply directly to ordinary courts to have their partnerships recognised while the Seimas continues to stall on legislation. This ruling aligns with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights – in Fedotova and Others v. Russia, Buhuceanu and Others v. Romania, Maymulakhin and Markiv v. Ukraine, and Przybyszewska and Others v. Poland, the ECtHR has established a positive obligation on states to provide legal recognition for same-sex couples. In other words, the proposed referendum asks the public to “advise” the Seimas to violate Lithuania’s Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights all at once.

From an LGBTIQ rights perspective, however, this referendum is far more than a legal absurdity – it is a political signal that existing citizens can be turned into props in an election campaign. The point of constitutional democracy is precisely that the dignity, private and family life, and equality of a minority are not up for a majority vote – they are protected from shifting majoritarian moods. While the Seimas continues to drag its feet on a partnership law, couples  are forced to prove the existence of their own families in court, one case at a time. Asking them to additionally submit to a “consultative” vote on whether they even deserve to be called a family turns human rights into a popularity contest. That is not democracy – it is institutionally organised discrimination.