Romanian extremist rapped over anti-gay comments

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania's top anti-discrimination body said on Thursday it had issued a stern warning to ultra-nationalist party leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor for anti-gay comments on TV.

A candidate in last year's presidential election, flamboyant Vadim Tudor, known for his rhetoric against ethnic minorities, recently focused on Romania's homosexual community.

"Homosexuals are an aberration of nature," he told private OTV television in late May.

"They shouldn't mess with me because I'm going to impale them on wooden stakes and they might like it," he said, alluding to the favorite punishment of Romania's notorious medieval ruler, Vlad Dracula the Impaler.

The National Council for Combating Discrimination said Vadim Tudor's comments had earned him a disciplinary warning and he could face a fine of up to $1,350 euros if he repeats them.

"His statements violate gay minority rights to dignity, freedom from discrimination and equal treatment and for that reason we sent him a warning," it said in a statement.

Vadim Tudor angrily rejected the warning and said he would sue the council for trying to muzzle him.

"I will sue them for this warning. I am the one who is discriminated against because they don't allow me to express my constitutional right to free speech," he said.

"Why don't they condemn the Pope? He is also a Christian and he doesn't agree with sodomy, which is the second deadly sin after murder," he added.

Vadim Tudor founded the Greater Romania Party after the 1989 fall of communism and made it to the final round of the 2000 presidential race, won by former president Ion Iliescu.

He once mustered as much as 33 percent of the vote on an anti-minorities platform but his party only won about 13 percent in November's elections. His usual targets have been Romania's Hungarian, Jewish and Roma minorities.

It is the second time in a year that Romania's gay community has taken center stage in Romanian politics. Gay rights groups appealed to political parties during the election campaign to stop using the issue to win votes in a conservative society.

Homosexuality is legal in European Union candidate Romania, but the public largely accepts the powerful Orthodox church's view that is it a sin and a disease.

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