Riga- For once, the most eccentric sound-bite at Riga's gay pride parade on Sunday did not come from one of the marchers. It came from the shaven-headed protester who trailed the parade, shouting "Gays are communists!" - without apparent irony.
Since the EU expanded to admit 10 new members, mainly from the former Communist bloc, in 2004, gay rights have become one of the hottest topics in the political arena.
Pro-gay groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have all applied for permission to stage Gay Pride parades in their respective capitals, arguing that it is their right under EU law.
But the move has prompted a savage backlash, with marches being banned by the authorities and attacked by groups ranging from religious extremists to ultra-nationalists and communists.
"They (the anti-gay groups) really are strange bedfellows," Dutch MEP Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
"They don't yet have a clear ideology - there are marked anti- establishment, anti-democratic elements, but ... mainline politicians have also put their stamp of approval on it," added Ilze Brands- Kehris, one of Latvia's top human-rights experts.
The arguments used by anti-gay groups are as varied as their proponents. Some religious groups have called gays "devils" who "breach the Christian majority's human rights" by going public.
Others, religious and secular, have accused them of threatening the traditional family, abusing children and advocating bestiality.
And still others have said that homosexuality is being "forced" on the native population by the EU - a view sometimes justified with the claim that there are "no gays" in Eastern Europe.
"It's very difficult to engage them in debate - you can't challenge the illogical aspect of their argument logically," said Amnesty International researcher Anders Dahlbeck.
In part, this wave of opposition is considered a heritage of the Communist past. Homosexuality was banned in the Communist era, and attitudes to sexuality are still dominated by Soviet propaganda.
"Communist society was based on the idea that diversity was wrong ... that inspired a new generation of nationalists to be intolerant towards ethnic and sexual minorities," Dahlbeck said.
Since the fall of the former USSR, hardline Christian movements which offer a similarly monolithic world-view have become immensely popular - far more so than more moderate groups in the same church.
Latvia's Lutheran church, for example, has condemned not only homosexuality, but even women priests - a step which is seen as being radically at odds with mainstream European Lutheranism.
But the Communist past is only one part of the problem; as experts point out, former-Communist states such as the Czech Republic and Slovenia have recently approved gay-partnership laws.
Observers agree that much of the responsibility lies with local politicians who have played on anti-gay feeling for political ends.
"The gays are the activating agent, but clearly some politicians have to take the responsibility for giving the signal which mobilized the extreme anti-gay element," Brands-Kehris said.
The Polish minister for education, for example, recently launched measures to ban education on sexual orientation from schools, while the Children's Ombudswoman accused BBC TV show "The Teletubbies" of having a latently homosexual message.
The Latvian parliament last year rejected anti-discrimination legislation mandated by the EU, and appointed the country's most outspoken anti-gay activist as head of its human-rights commission.
And this year Vilnius became the first city in the EU to close its doors to an EU-backed "tolerance bus," with the city council saying that they feared violence from anti-gay groups.
These moves have not gone unnoticed in Brussels. All three countries have been harshly criticized across Europe - leading at least some of the anti-gay movement's erstwhile political leaders to tone down their rhetoric.
But given that those same leaders have already labelled pro- tolerance campaigns as "foreign-imposed propaganda," they are likely to find the wave of hate harder to still than it was to raise.
"The genie is out of the bottle. It could be quite hard to put it back in now," Brands-Kehris said.
