Xavier Bettel, the openly gay prime
minister of Luxembourg, told the United Nations on Tuesday that
everyone has a duty to challenge hate speech.
Bettel spoke during a UN panel on
ending hate speech against sexual minorities. Advocates said that
Bettel is the first openly gay world leader to speak on LGBT rights
at the UN.
“I never wanted to be the gay prime
minister,” he
told the crowd. “But I'm the prime minister and I'm gay.”
“Being gay was not my choice. But not
to accept it is a choice. And to accept myself was so difficult. I
don't ask people to judge, but to accept. Homophobia is a personal
choice. And we have to fight against it.”
“We are all part and we all have a
responsibility,” he said of ending hate speech. “This starts from
… your politicians but it goes also to a family evening, to dinner
with friends, with family. If they have hate speech, you can never
accept it.”
Other openly gay world leaders include
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar and Serbia Prime Minister Ana
Brnabic.
Bettel, 46, married his husband,
architect Gauthier Destenay, in 2015, making him the first European
Union leader to marry a person of the same sex while in office.
(Related: White
House omits husband of Luxembourg's Xavier Bettel from photo
caption.)