Some are more equal

Remember the ministries in 1984? The Ministry of Peace, responsible for war; the Ministry of Love, responsible for torture? Most governments are more subtle about this sort of thing, but Italy, a country that enjoys subtlety in so many guises, from moral hypocrisy to Andreottian dissimulation, has taken a cruder leaf out of Orwell's book. The Ministry for Equal Opportunities is now explicitly discriminating against gays. During the last government, minister Barbara Pollastrini instituted a web site listing the various groups that suffered discrimination for reasons of religion, health, nationality, sexual orientation and so on. The new minister, ex-calendar girl Mara Carfagna (seen here on government business), has removed all reference to homophobia from the site, presumably on the grounds that, under the wise and caring governance of such gay-friendly politicians as Berlusconi, Bossi, Calderoli etc. the phenomenon no longer exists in Italy. Like racism and sexism and all those other nasty -isms, it's been smoothed away and replaced by a feeling of general wellbeing and love towards one neighbour, ideally a 17-year-old blonde with acquiescent parents. What other reason could there be? To prove my point, she's also got rid of a commission set up by Pollastrini, for LGBT rights. Clearly there's no more need for it. What a wonderful world we live in. And I've just heard some Northern League apparatchik on television say that the fact that the centre for illegal immigrants on Lampedusa is now empty is a clear indication that government policy on immigration is working. This is like claiming that an empty hospital is working by ignoring the dead and dying refused admittance. 

Maybe the art of subtlety isn't entirely dead.

From A to B, via C, is just so gay

According to some new research, although I feel I've read it all before, gay men and straight women can't navigate, while lesbian and straight men can. This is due to the relative proportions of the left and right hemispheres of their brains. I don't have time to get mine scanned, however tempting the prospect is, so I can't check, but I do know that I have an almost unerring sense of direction, which would make me a lesbian or a straight man, and no inclination at all to have sex with women, which wouldn't. My partner, on the other hand, bless his cotton socks, would get lost in a glass of water, as we say in Italy, which tends to confirm the research.

Is there something wrong with me? Will I wake up one morning and not know my left from my right, and need a map to find the local supermarket, and walk out of shops and turn back in the direction I came from and end up standing on a vaguely familiar corner wondering where the hell I am? Or will I just buy the latest Mara Carfagna calender and drool over those ministerial curves? Maybe some minor brain surgery can be performed, to slightly deflate my right hemisphere. Or maybe, just maybe, the research isn't quite as watertight as it would like to be. I wonder if Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will have anything to say about this... I wonder which way is up...

Postscript to postscript

Sorry about this - and believe me, I really am trying to move on - but I was so appalled by this example of partisan journalism, in a country that knows little else, that I felt I had to share it. For those among you who don't speak Italian, the irate young man in a suit at the beginning of the piece isn't one of the spotty fascists (from Casa Pound, god help us) who tried to disrupt the march last Saturday, but a frustrated groom. He was supposed to be getting married in Via dei Fori Imperiali, but couldn't get the car to the church. Authorisation had been granted months before, he said. Sound familiar? Right! If the council had respected the authorisation it gave to Gay Pride months before, he wouldn't have found his wedding delayed. Odd that no one in the studio thought of pointing this out.

The skinny bint playing nervously with her pen in the rest of the piece is Carfagna. You may not have recognised her with her clothes on. She's talking about sobriety and stuff like that, but I won't bother you any more with her silliness. We've all heard enough from Carfagna for one government.

Ave Hitler

Now that the catholic church has got a government prepared to present its belly to the clerical boot without any questions being asked, this photograph is a useful reminder of another epoch in which the interests of church and state also appeared to coincide.

(I wouldn't have felt the need to post this rather snippy comment if I hadn't just heard Minister for Equal Opportunities Mara Carfagna (see topless photo here) explain why Rome, as the heart of Christianity, isn't an appropriate venue for Gay Pride. Maybe someone should tell her that it was also home to Julius Caesar, Petronius, Hadrian, etc. But why bother? Why tell the monkey what the organ grinder already knows?)

Thanks to Marisacat for the photo.

Ministerium

Mara Carfagna is Minister for Equal Opportunities in Berlusconi's new cabinet. This poster comes from an earlier incarnation as calendar fodder and, oddly, wasn't used to promote her campaign during the recent elections. Possibly because Italian voters aren't actually allowed to choose their representatives, but only the party to which they belong. In the lovely Mara's case, the Popolo delle Libertà, otherwise known as Poppe al Vento (Boobs to the Wind). I wonder what Gianni Alemanno, Rome's new mayor, thinks about this sort of exhibitionism.

Carfagna announced last year that gay unions shouldn't be recognised because 'homosexuals are constitutionally sterile.' No one is quite sure what this means, but it certainly feels offensive.

Pontification

A clique of sex-obsessed old men in the Vatican continues its offensive against civil union legislation (read DICO) by stigmatising the demonstration last Saturday in Piazza Farnese as carnivalesque, hysterical, a masquerade and so on. As one who was there, I can tell them this simply isn't true, that the event was almost depressingly sober.

But--as is the case with most phobics--the truth doesn't seem to be what concerns them. Once again, ignoring the scope and purpose of the proposed legislation, that of ensuring a measure of economic security to couples bound by affection, regardless of sex and sexual orientation, l'Osservatore Romano (the Vatican house organ) accuses the demonstration of two cardinal sins: a lack of respect, and an inappropriate use of children.

It's both arrogant and mendacious to expect people who are constantly insulted, demeaned and denigrated to show respect for their denigrators. Respect is mutual, or not at all. And the casuistic papal tosh that the homosexual is worthy of respect as an individual but not as someone capable of giving and receiving love (and, yes, that includes sex) is the kind of nonsense it can apply to its own members if it wants, although it's signally failed to convince a significant number of priests, bishops, cardinals and even, dare I say it, pontiffs of this. But it certainly has no right to extend its magister to the rest of the population.

Besides, if a couple of papal hats made out of cardboard are all it takes to make a carnival, what on earth is the real thing supposed to be? And if a slogan saying the Devil wears Prada is so deeply offensive to Ratzinger why doesn't he think a little harder about the appropriacy of wearing designer clobber and rattling on about poverty? Presumably for the same reason he presides over an ostensibly celibate institution and 'defends the family' as natural law.

The presence of children at the demo appears to have been particularly galling to pontifical sensibilities. It's becoming increasingly clear that what perturbs Ratzinger et al. isn't the fact that gays are 'constitutionally sterile' (as Berlusconi's tart, Mara Carfagna, says), but that we're the opposite. We can have children! And we do! It's our sexual potency that's so disturbing. And the comments made yesterday by the Minister for the Family (and co-author of the draft bill), Rosy Bindi, to the effect that gay men and lesbians 'can forget children', is in line with this fear. But what on earth does she mean? That the law will annul the desire for maternity and paternity? That we'll have to be sterilised in order to share a pension? As a celibate herself, she clearly needs to learn a little about human ingenuity. If gays want kids, they'll have them. And if the law makes life difficult for gay couples and their children, it's the children who'll suffer. Is this what Bindi wants? Apparently yes. In a remark which appals on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin, she announced that it's better to leave a child in Africa, with its tribe (!), than to allow its adoption by a gay couple. Has she told Madonna? But that's OK. Millionaire absentee mothers and their male bitches (sorry, Guy!) are perfectly acceptable parents for African children...

Phylogenetic, ontogenetic... As long as our mothers love us

Berlusconi totty, Mara Carfagna, ex showgirl transformed into member of parliament for the capo's 'political' party,Forza Italia, announced a couple of days ago that gay couples couldn't be considered families because they were 'constitutionally sterile'. Tell that to a broody lesbian with a turkey baster.

More to the point, as a national legislator (Zeus help us!) she appears to be saying that all childless couples should be denied legal recognition. This would exclude all women after menopause from the joys of holy wedlock, not to speak of those born sterile, soldiers and otherwise whose balls have been blown off in Iraq, bearers of defective genes who choose not to reproduce, etc.

It's a curiously dumbed-down version of biological determinism dressed up as 'natural order.' It certainly doesn't seem to have much to do with spirituality. But, of course, this isn't what she means. Sterility isn't the issue. Gayness is.

And her homophobia was echoed in yesterday's Repubblica by Vittorio Mathieu--historian and philosopher we're informed by the paper--who announced that he's writing a paper about homosexuality. Before you get too excited, let me give you a foretaste. Apparently, homosexuality can't be phylogenetic, because 'the species would die out.' Well, not necessarily, old chum. As this book says:

... more and more detailed studies of animals in their natural environments made it increasingly difficult to discount all sexual interactions in animals among members of the same sex as exceptions, as idiosyncrasies, or as pathologies. Slowly, but steadily, a quite different picture emerged. A recent encyclopaedic volume by Bruce Bagemihl (1999) on animal homosexual behaviour provides evidence that hundreds of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes, insects, spiders and other invertebrates engage in same-sex sexual activity. Clearly, what was once thought to be an aberration appears to be a behavioural pattern that is broadly, albeit unevenly, distributed across the animal kingdom (see also Dagg, 1984; Sommer, 1990; Vasey, 1995). Indeed, within a select number of species, homosexual activity is widespread and occurs at levels that approach or sometimes even surpass heterosexual activity.

But for university professor Vittorio Mathieu, Opus Dei acolyte and contributor to neocon mouthpiece Studi Cattolici, homosexuality must be ontogenetic, i.e. 'a regression to a certain stage of development or the state of remaining in that stage'. In other words, we haven't grown up properly. We're stuck in some early pubescent dick-sucking time-warp. It's an oddly Freudian position for a Catholic to adopt but, as the saying goes, the enemies of my enemies are my friends. Next thing you know he'll be saying our mothers made us. Well, he's certainly giving us the wool.

Guess what! My spell-checker doesn't recognise neocon. It suggests coconut as a valid alternative...