The author of the children's fairy tale book "A Heart of Amber," Neringa Dangvydė, claims that she wanted to tell her readers about groups suffering from social exclusion and discrimination.
Two of the fairy tales in her book also featured homosexual protagonists - a prince smitten by a black tailor and a princess who fell in love with a shoemaker's daughter.
The publisher of "A Heart of Amber," the Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences, removed the book from shelves in 2014, calling it "harmful, primitive and biased propaganda of homosexuality."
The university based its decision on the opinion of the Office of the Inspector of Journalistic Ethics, which stated that fairy tales about marriage between same-sex characters violated the provisions of the Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effects of Public Information.
Active censorship
The 2009 amendment to the law expanded the list of information that is harmful to minors by including information that "expresses contempt for family values [and] encourages the concept of entry into a marriage and creation of a family other than stipulated in the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania and the Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania."
The provision in question has been used to censor the self-expression of homosexuals, for example, by ensuring that the social ads inviting people to attend the Baltic Pride could only be broadcast after 11 p.m., with a warning that this information was for adults only.
No discrimination
The author challenged the university's decision in court, claiming that the distribution of the book was stopped due to discrimination, but the Vilnius Regional Court did not heed her arguments.
The judicial panel affirmed the opinion of the Office of the Inspector of Journalistic Ethics, pointing out that "neither the Constitution nor the Civil Code talks about marriage in any form other than that between persons of a different gender, i.e. a man and a woman."
The court did not even attempt to consider what possible harm fairy tales of same-sex marriage could actually do to minors.
