WARSAW LETTER / Daniel McLaughlin: He has been attacked by skinheads and threatened by police, but Szymon Niemiec can only see life in Poland getting even tougher. "For gays and lesbians, today's Poland is like 1930s Germany," he says. "We are ruled by a fascist party, which uses the same language and ideas as Hitler."
As a prominent gay rights campaigner, Mr Niemiec (25) has long been a target for extremist groups, but since the election of the Law and Justice party last autumn he has felt a new wave of prejudice coursing through deeply Catholic, conservative Poland.
"The police even visited my home," he says, "and they told me they were ready to do what they did in 1985, when hundreds of gays and lesbians were rounded up and interrogated by the communist security services."
Law and Justice (PiS) came to power promising to purge the European Union's largest new member of corruption, cronyism and disparities of wealth that have sent the Warsaw skyline soaring while the elderly struggle and unemployment nudges 20 per cent.
Many however see a dark side to the party's "moral revolution" and the rhetoric of other social conservatives now challenging for power across central Europe.
Human Rights Watch has accused President Lech Kaczynski of presiding over "official homophobia" in Poland, where as mayor of Warsaw he banned gay parades and said he was "not willing to meet perverts".
His twin brother, Jaroslaw, the leader of PiS, has said gays should not teach in schools, while prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz has called homosexuality an "unnatural" thing that the state must prevent from "infecting" the general public.
"These are Catholic fundamentalists," says Tomasz Szypula, of Poland's Campaign Against Homophobia. "They talk about total prohibition of abortion, and one of the first things they did after taking power was abolish the government office for gender equality, which dealt with all forms of prejudice here."
It also helped fund many minority rights groups and was the kind of anti- discrimination body that the EU demands in all member states. Critics say its abolition exemplified the government's scorn for Brussels.
"Some of the new EU members signed up to decrees to get into the EU but now treat them like an a la carte menu on which they can ignore what they don't like," says Michael Cashman, an English MEP.
"This is part of a Catholic fundamentalism, aided and abetted by the image of the dead pope," he said, referring to Polish pontiff John Paul II, who died last April, "and they think that anyone who undermines their idea of the family should be denied fundamental rights."
Events in Poland and moves to ban gay marriage in Latvia and Lithuania prompted the European Parliament to pass a resolution against homophobia in January. Only six of 54 Polish MEPs backed the motion, and many say the EU cannot hope to match the influence of the Catholic Church on Poland's new government.
President Kaczynski's first foreign trip was to the Vatican, and government officials frequently give exclusive interviews to the print and broadcast media run by controversial Catholic priest Tadeusz Rydzyk.
Through five decades of communist rule, the church survived as a symbol of resistance and Polish identity. Now, for millions of Poles struggling to adapt to free-market life, it is again the rallying point for a return to traditional, national values.
"The EU is seen as a godless, atheist, immoral, liberal thing," says Marek Antoni Nowicki, the head of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Warsaw. "For Catholic societies like Poland's, that creates a psychological distance."
This year's elections in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic also look likely to favour right-wing eurosceptics with a streak of social conservatism.
Slovakia's coalition government collapsed recently when its biggest party blocked a bill to give Catholics the right to refuse certain duties on religious grounds.
Czech homosexuals lambasted their president for vetoing a law to extend the rights of same-sex partners, with a ruling that activist Jiri Hromada called "a tragic decision from a medieval monarch".
Mr Cashman calls intolerance "a worrying trend in eastern Europe". "We mustn't let a shift to more right-wing governments undermine the rights of minorities, or let people use hate-speak to appeal to voters."
The rhetoric of intolerance rarely spawns violence in Poland, but Mr Nowicki sees danger in recent government attacks on the independent media and judiciary.
"It is not about the government passing certain laws, but creating a certain atmosphere," he says. "Safeguards exist, and we have to prevent their erosion. If they want a war then it has at least one positive aspect - that there are many people here ready to fight them."