The U.S. Ambassador to Hungary hasn’t exactly been embraced by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. But now, it seems, things are getting petty.
David Pressman, a gay human rights lawyer who acts as Washington, D.C.’s envoy in Budapest, had been hoping to attend an event in Hungary’s parliament building this week. “I was honored to have been invited to speak at an event organized by members of Hungary’s parliament featuring a diverse array of speakers inside of the house of Hungarian democracy where they were elected to work,” Pressman told The Daily Beast. But the gathering, which Pressman says was intended to address “the human rights of the LGBT community,” never took place.
The event had been arranged by a parliamentary group called For a Diverse Hungary. The organization, which is made up of 20 Hungarian lawmakers from five different opposition parties, aims to “give a voice to the community in the parliament and represent both the ideas and the interests of the LGBTQ community in Hungary,” Dávid Bedő, the group’s chairman and a member of the Hungarian parliament with the centrist Momentum party, tells The Daily Beast.
