Croatian, Serbian Rightists Join Forces at Family Conference

Conservative groups from Croatia and Serbia will take part in the 11th annual meeting of the World Congress of Family, WCF, in Budapest between Thursday and Sunday where a number of people from right-wing groups will gather.

Croatia's conservative NGO "In the Name of the Family" and Serbia's right-wing, anti-EU party Dveri both confirmed that their leaders will attend the event.

Based in Rockford in the US State of Illinois, WCF was founded in 1997 by a conservative Christian scholar Allan Carlson, gathering NGOs, parties and groups who advocate traditional families and oppose birth control, abortion, same-sex marriage, gay adoption, gender ideology, feminism and secularism.

In the last 20 years, the WCF organised 11 summits all across the world, while this year's event, organised under the auspices of the Hungarian government, the Budapest authorities and the local Catholic Church, is named: "Building Family-Friendly Nations: Making Families Strong Again."

Some of the speakers are controversial. Don Feder, one of WCF's coordinators, who will be speaking at the summit, is known for opposing an initiative to put the African-American abolitionist Harriet Tubman on a 20-dollar bill in 2016, stating that "American history was made by white males who were overwhelmingly Christian".

A partner organisation present in Budapest is the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom International, ADF, whose leadership welcomed the re-criminalisation of homosexual intercourse in India in 2013.

Another speaker is Errol Naidoo, leader of the South African NGO Family Policy Institute, who in 2012 that said "abortion-on-demand - driven by radical feminist activists - and the homosexual agenda, lie at the heart of the culture of death", which he said was...