By a majority vote on Tuesday (19/04/2010), the Seimas approved the proposal of the Committee on Legal Affairs of the Seimas to return the amendments to the Administrative Code to legislator Gražulis for improvement. According to Stasys Šedbaras, the chairman of the committee, the draft law must not contain provisions which could be held to be contravening the Constitution, establish sanctions against a single group of people on the basis of their sexual orientation, or contain provisions contravening international obligations.

Parliamentarian Petras Gražulis has made ‘improvements’ to amendments he initiated to the Administrative Code. These amendments seek to establish penalties for ‘propagating homosexual relationships’, a move LGL chairman Vladimir Simonko says could suppress gay pride parades, film festivals and other public advocacy events for LGBT rights.

In his early version of the amendment to the law, Gražulis suggested that ‘public propagation of homosexual relations [will be] subject to a fine of 2,000 to 10,000 litas (580 – 2896 euros)’.

In the new proposal, Gražulis clarifies that the propagation of homosexual relations is the ‘public propagation of homosexual relations – the dissemination of such ideas or campaigning for them’. Gražulis has also changed his mind concerning the maximum fine, suggesting an amount of 6,000 instead of 10,000 litas (1737 – 2896 euros) for propagating homosexual relationships.

‘In principle nobody persecutes them [homosexuals], but we are defending our children from them so that they would not cripple our children. Personally, they may live as they want but not cripple our children’, Gražulis said.

Social Democrat Birutė Vėsaitė explained that according to the Constitution all people are equal irrespective of their sexual orientation. ‘As long as there are initiatives such as the initiative of Gražulis to penalise and prohibit, I believe people of another orientation also have the right to protest against such unthinking members of the Seimas who trample the Constitution and human rights and dignity in general’, Vėsaitė said after suggesting that the draft law should be rejected outright.