By Laurel Duggan – Riccardo Simonetti, LGBT ambassador to the European Union Parliament, dressed as a transgender Virgin Mary for the cover of a Berlin-based queer magazine.
The photos show a bearded Simonetti in a tunic and veil, holding a baby who is presumably representing Jesus. In another photo he is holding the baby with another man, who appears to represent Joseph, wrapping his arms around Simonetti.
“If we ignore the fact that Jesus wasn’t white, we could as well believe the Virgin Mary had a beard, why not?” Simonetti wrote in the caption to his Instagram post.
Simonetti is German, and he became a special envoy for LGBT issues for the European Union Parliament in 2021, according to his website.
“Awesome. Very transgressive. Very brave. Now do Trans Muhammad. I dare you,” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry of the Ethics and Public Policy Center commented on Twitter.
“How else could the famously tolerant and respectful rainbow community celebrate advent if not with a blasphemous, pointless provocation?” Peter Heltai, a Hungarian journalist, wrote on Twitter.
The left-leaning European Union has struggled with its smaller and more conservative member states in recent years as countries such as Poland or Hungary resist EU directives to acknowledge gay marriage, deemphasize Christianity, loosen abortion restrictions and join the EU in supporting shifting norms on gender identity issues.