The ultraconservative association Vigilare said on Friday that they had started a petition "to protect children against adoption or foster care by same-sex couples," state agency Hina reported on Friday.

In a letter sent to the Minister of Labour, Pension System, Family and Social Policy, Josip Aladrovic, the association posed a rhetorical question asking “If a child to be given away for adoption or foster care has the right to a mother and father or is just a guinea pig?” Hina reported.

In the letter, Vigilare went on to say that “children deserve not only financial security but also the diversity of male and female love, thinking, and experience, as only that way can they get a balanced view of the male and female worlds and be taught interaction and respect, so that one day they themselves may wish to have their own family with a person of the opposite sex and their own biological children.”

Vigilare’s petition came in response to a recent decision of the Administrative Court in Zagreb which ruled, in a case launched by a gay couple, that they must not be discriminated against in the process of evaluation for adoption. “This decision,” an unnamed LGBTIQ activist cited by state agency Hina, “confirms that life partners in Croatia can become adoptive parents.”

The court ruling is not final.

Vigilare called on Aladrovic to “realise the importance of the current situation” as “he can be remembered either as the minister who protected the best interests of children in adoption and foster care procedures, or as the minister who gave in to political and social ideological revolutionaries who perform unverified and dangerous experiments, using children as guinea pigs.”

Hina reported that the local media reported that Aladrovic’s ministry would appeal against the ruling of the Administrative Court which had quashed the ministry’s earlier decision to order a new procedure because the decision denying the right to adopt children for life partners Ivo Segota and Mladen Kozic “did not contain an explanation as to why it was not in the interest of children to grant them the status of adoptive parents.”

The ministry noted, however, that it would act in line with the court’s final decision.