Hate (crimes) postscript

Come on, you don't need me to translate this for you. Make an effort. Sweat a little. After all, you never know how useful these very words might be on your next trip to Italy. You might bump into a cardinal and want to introduce yourself. You might glance up from the deck of your yacht to see Mastella sunning himself with a bevy (as I believe they're called) of topless lovelies. You might be shopping for souvenirs at the SM counter of a sexy shop (yes, that's what they're called) and see Binetti hanging round the harness section. You might be on the receiving end of a homophobic gang attack and have nothing but words to defend yourself with. Because there won't be any law there to help you.

What's in a name? The same old cop-out

Forget PACS (What do you mean, you already have?) Forget DICO (Eat more fish!). The latest acronym to tantalise and tease us, as Dame Shirley Bassey might have put it, is CUS. It stands for Contratto di Unione Solidale (Solid Union Contract) and it's supposed to be the answer to every unmarried couple's prayer for legal recognition.

Well, it ain't. It makes no provision for tax relief, is downright evasive about pension rights, postpones inheritance rights until the ninth year of the contract and even then allots the surviving partner no more than a quarter of what's left if a brother or sister of the deceased is still alive. It doesn't allow for leave when the partner's sick. Basically, it's a cock-up.

On the other hand, it's so gutless and bland it will be interesting to see what the homophobes of the centre-left come up with to attack it. The centre-right is already calling the CUS a do-it-yourself marriage, so let's all grab a hammer and a handful of nails and knock one up.

It's also an unfortunate acronym, unlike DICO, which had a nice ambiguity, and ring, to it. CUS stands for University Sports Centre in Italian, so expect some fun there as chest-heaving hearties defend their sexual integrity. What's more, it rhymes with only two words in Italian: pus and bus. Is this really the image we need? Unpunctual, overcrowded, and er, yellow?

DICO SI... with reservations

Finally an acronym that has a sense to it. DICO (short for dichiarazione di convivenza, or 'declaration of cohabitation') looks set to replace PACS as the shorthand for civil unions in Italy.

The word's particularly appropriate because it means 'I say', and not as an expression of polite surprise. It's in-your-face enough to work in manifestos, it lends itself wonderfully to banners, as in IO DICO SI! (I say yes!). Or, even better, IO DICO NO... A CARDINALE RUINI!. (I offer this merely as a suggestion - each to his own ferret noire.)

Its very pugnacity means that it will be used as effectively against its supporters, alas, as by them. But indifference to their use is in the nature of all arms worth respecting.

Now all we have to do is print the t-shirts. I'll be coming to the reservations later.

Blair yes, Zapatero no

It's odd that whenever people want to attack the idea of 'gay marriage' the stick they use to beat it with bears the smiling Bambi head of Zapatero. The fact that civil partnerships have also been introduced to England under Tony Blair is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Maybe Blair's work in other fields, such as warmongering, has exonerated him.

Towards the watershed...

The latest news is that a Cabinet meeting this afternoon may reach a decision on the civil union bill. Let's hope it isn't in Latin.

God's ferret strikes again

Cardinal Ruini appears to have made use of L'Avvenire, the Vatican newspaper, in his latest offensive against civil unions. An unsigned editorial (but undoubtedly the ferret's work) threatens that the kind of legal recognition of unmarried couples likely to be proposed by the government would be a "watershed that will inevitably weigh on the future of Italian politics".

The editorial declares "Non possumus", a formula apparently last used in 1860 by Pius IX to reject the unification of Italy and the usurpation of the church's authority. If this isn't interference in the internal political affairs of a neighbouring state I don't know what is. Rosy Bindi, Minister of Families and co-drafter of the bill, said, "I don't speak Latin." Unfortunately, a lot of other people in parliament do.

In the meantime, Cardinal Poletto of Turin claims that the new law is the devil's work, announcing that "there is no doubt the devil exists." One of the ways in which he works, apparently, is to induce people to sin by means of legislation decided to "tear the family apart."

Blimey.

What's civil about this?

The government is still arguing about exactly what to do with all these people who just don't want to get married and breed. And not only the government. The Italian president, ex-communist Giorgio Napolitano, threw in his tuppenny-hapenny worth a couple of days ago, announcing that the Vatican's views on PACS, or civil unions, should be taken into account. If this was a conciliatory gesture, it backfired. The episcopal council yesterday said that no compromise was possible, the traditional role of the family was sacred, marriage was an absolute value, etc. The usual position, in other words, and why not? Isn't grunting what pigs do best, even exclusively?

With 56% of Italians now in favour of civil unions, the opinion of God's ferret and his merry gang of sex-obsessed septuagenarians is daily less significant. The problem's within the government itself. Mastella, Minister of Justice, refuses to endorse the bill as a matter, apparently, of conscience after a career based on the most shameless political expediency. An anti-abortionist called Paola Binetti whines on about family, family, family, as though marriages will crumble at the merest whiff of visiting rights in hospital. (Hey! Why go to all the fuss of getting married? I can watch you die without it!)

Meanwhile, the two women responsible for drawing up the bill, because of course it's women's work, are arguing about how long a civil union should last before one can inherit the pension of the other. They're doing a Sugar and Spice routine, like police interrogators. Sugar says five years is long enough. Spice says fifteen, but may come down to ten. Will this be applied retroactively? I don't think so. Great news to couples in their fifties or sixties, who may have been together for decades, like my friend Dan and his partner.

And how long do widows/widowers (I'm talking the real thing here, obviously, the genuinely ex-married) have to be together to qualify? Not one fucking day.

God's ferret

Cardinal Ruini was on the news last night. If Ratzinger is God's Rotweiller, he must be God's ferret, skinny and fast enough to get into the tightest of holes and root out heretics. It's an ever-growing category, always one step behind the awful possibilities offered by science, aided by 'bioethics', but the old favourites remain. Yesterday His Eminence was moaning about euthanasia and, you guessed it, PACS.

I wonder why Italian never comes up with its own words these days, just filches them from somewhere else: authority, PACS, welfare, privacy. It might be because what's being described is so incommensurately foreign that a brand new word (new brand word?) would be wasted. Authority: a government body that doesn't have any. Welfare: the name of a ministry in a country without a social security net outside the family. Privacy: a travesty when Italy has the highest number of intercepted mobile calls in Europe and beyond.

But it's that naughty French acronym PACS, or what the papers insist on calling 'gay marriage', that really gets the old goat's goat. On a personal level (mine), his ranting is particularly inappropriate at the moment. I heard a few days ago that the partner of a friend and colleague of mine (let's call him Dan) had died of cancer just before Christmas. Dan had been with his partner for 36 years. They'd shared a house, their lives, their incomes for more than half their existence and now they've shared a death, each in his own way. Dan's partner had a pension and if Dan and his partner had been able to define their relationship legally (no tulle, no confetti, a simple contract would have done, what even Blair has had the sense to define as a 'civil' partnership) that pension would now be his. If Dan had been a wife, this would have been automatic. As it is, Dan may stand to lose his house, because he can't afford the mortgage.

We're not discussing sacred bonds here. If there's anything sacred in love, the 36 years they spent together are all the proof that's needed. We're talking banal things, like security, money, the space to grieve without thinking about how to pay the bills. Oh yes, if his partner's parents had still been alive, Dan would have to deal with that as well, because half their house would automatically be theirs, whatever his partner might have wanted. That's Roman law.

I don't know what His Ferret would say if I told him about Dan. I don't suppose he'd care. He has bigger fish to defend than a 'gay widower'.