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.

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?

A question of numbers

According to its promoters, the Family Day demonstration a few weeks ago, designed to fight government proposals for recognition of civil unions, attracted a million people. That's more or less one sixtieth of the population and enough, says Paola Binetti, self-mortifying defender of the faith, to rule out civil union legislation in Italy. Hmm.

The standard estimate is that one tenth of the Italian population is gay. That would mean that 100,000 participants at this year's Gay Pride (in Rome on 16 June - be there!) would have the same demographic weight as Family Day. It would, in other words, cancel it out. What's more, if there are over 100,000 participants, let's say 200,000, by Binetti's logic this would be enough to rule out opposition to DICO legislation. The ball would then be in their court. Family Day Two? Second Family Day? The latter would certainly be more approriate for most of the philandering centre-right politicians who took part in the first.

Naughty Fausto!

The Families Association Forum is frothing at the mouth about the fact that Italy's Speaker at the House of Deputies, Fausto Bertinotti, friend of Castro, Carlos and, er, the Dalai Lama and just back from a rejuvenating spiritual break on Mount Athos, has decided to support Gay Pride. Their gripe is that he refused to take part in Family Day, which apparently disqualifies him from participating in anything else, ever, especially if it's gay friendly.

I've been thinking how odd it is that, among these people who presumably use reason in other areas of their daily lives, the idea of family should be seen as inimical to the idea of being gay. Where do they imagine we come from? Hordes of turkey-baster wielding lesbians in Amsterdam or San Francisco? Stem cell manipulation in some illicit Scandinavian laboratory? Parthenogenesis? (If that's what it's called when you spring fully armed from your father's thigh.)

Doesn't it occur to them that we're as much a product of the heterosexual family as anyone else? Doesn't it occur to them that most of us, without heterosexual families, wouldn't exist? Doesn't it occur to them that, despite their efforts, many of us are still loved and cherished by the families that made us,a nd to which we continue to belong?

It's as though I'd somehow lost my human status, not only as a complete, fallible, reasoning being capable of love, but as a son and brother and nephew and cousin (and dog owner) too. But these people aren't really interested in families at all. They're too busy getting hot under the collar about what other people do in bed. They're too busy telling other people what to do.

Thoughts on Family Day

Last Saturday, over a million people (I’m quoting the organisers’ possibly over-generous estimate) gathered in Piazza San Giovanni, Rome, to assist the Vatican hierarchy in its dirty war against civil union legislation and, indirectly, the centre-left government. On the same day, in Smirne, Turkey, a million and a half people gathered to protest against the interference of religious bodies in the affairs of the state. Italy is a member of the EU; Turkey would like to be. I’ll let you decide which of the two countries was closer to the spirit of Europe last Saturday.

A woman with seven children, present at Family Day, was asked how she managed. Her answer: God provides. So what was she doing at a demonstration demanding more state support for those with fertile incontinence large families? Trying to have her host and eat it?

Listening to people talk in favour of Family Day it would seem that the only criterion that distinguishes a family from any other form of social aggregation—and that gives it inestimably added value—is breeding capacity. No progs, no parity. It used to be common to hear gay people refer to straights as breeders. Maybe it still is. But I never expected to find this idea taken so firmly on board by ‘Eggs’ Benedict and his merry band. (Although, thinking about it…)

A commentator on Italian state television (TG2, to be precise) said that the Family Day demonstrators were there to stand firm against a Europe that wanted to ban the use of words like Mummy and Daddy.

The buses and trains used to ferry the faithful to the demonstration from all over Italy, at the cost of something like a million Euro, were paid for by the Vatican, using money provided from people’s taxes (otto per mille*) for charitable work and the upkeep of the church. It’s an odd definition of charity. Or maybe large families can’t afford a day out in Rome without a handout. I wonder who paid for the ice cream.

*Otto per mille. Italian tax payers can devolve 0.8% of the tax they pay to a religious body of their choosing. Most of the people who bother devolve it to the Vatican (maybe as a result of the constant TV advertising, paid for by this money). The percentage of tax that isn’t assigned to anyone is divided up in the same proportions as that which is. The Vatican, in other words, gets a substantial slice of revenue from people who don’t want to give it to them. In Italy, this freebie is part of what is known as the separation of church and state. Anyone for Turkey?

Family Day: countdown

A few years ago, holier-than-thou British programmes like Eurotrash revelled in the excesses of Italian television. Remember the strip-tease housewives? The super-camp fortune tellers? The surgically enhanced tits and bums of showgirls and B-list actresses newsreaders and members of parliament? There’s been a general clean-up since then, but the essence of Italotrash can still be found. Not in the teeming undergrowth of local channels, but in post prime-time telly on the main state channel, Rai Uno.

Porta a Porta (Door to Door), a chat show that combines name-calling political debate with the most prurient tabloid journalism imaginable (I’m talking interviews with presumed infanticides, with mock-ups of the murder scene in the studio) was particularly hilarious yesterday evening.

The show was ostensibly about something called ‘Family Day’ (you have to pronounce it familee die to get the full joy), a kitschfest organised by the Vatican and its parliamentary drones for this Saturday in one of Rome’s main squares. The explicit aim of the demonstration is to ensure that civil union legislation is blocked and, with luck, bring down the government. It might as well be called Bye-bye Dico Day, but perhaps that’s too much English for its organisers to absorb. It’s supported by the usual gang of celibate self-harmers and right-wing divorcés.

The programme hosted four politicians, two from each coalition: well, naturally -- ‘balance’ or par condicio as it’s called here (see below for the way Italy prefers to use other languages for concepts it can’t quite absorb) is a legal requirement. It’s up to Bruno Vespa, the arbiter of the programme and a man beside whom Uriah Heep resembles Hannibal Lecter, to make sure the needs of the right are served in other, more subtle ways. I won’t name names, because that would be both invidious and, more importantly, libellous, but it was illuminating to listen to discussions of the value of the family conducted by a virgin, a closet queen, a libertine and a homophobe.

The cherry on the cake was Vespa asking Cardinal Scola, Archbishop of Venice, about the nature of love. You might as well ask a man with frostbitten fingers to mend a watch.

Bagnasco: Shame!

When does a comment become a threat? Apparently, when it's directed at the head of the Italian Episcopal Council. God's ferret stepped down a couple of months ago, to be replaced by Archbishop Bagnasco of Genoa. This would be of no more interest to most people than a change of management in any other state-subsidised company if it weren't that Bagnasco almost immediately used his pulpit to compare the recognition of civil unions to laws permitting paedophilia and incest, two troughs in which the church has its plurisecular snout. Needless to say, the idea that such laws might be proposed exists entirely in Bagnasco's mind.

Not surprisingly, some people reacted badly to this and, given the almost universal kowtowing to the church of the media and political world, chose to express their disapproval in a time-honoured Italian way: by writing it on a wall. The first graffiti, saying BAGNASCO VERGOGNA (Shame), appeared soon after the sermon (subsequently withdrawn, in pure Berlusconian fashion, when Bagnasco announced 'I didn't mean what I said'). Since then there's been a low level urban resistance of demonstrations, heckling, further graffiti. All part of the normal democratic process, you might think, but you'd be wrong. Bagnasco, according to the single voice that is Italian politics, is being 'threatened'.

Yesterday, or the day before, he received two letters. The first contained a bullet - a traditional mafia warning and thus, although it's unlikely to have been sent by the mafia, certainly construable as a threat. The second contained a photograph of the venerable archbishop with a hand-drawn swastika across his face. A threat? It's not particularly subtle, but neither is comparing a gay couple to paedophiles. It isn't the nicest thing to see over your bowl of episcopalian corn flakes, but it doesn't undermine the very tenets of democracy either, whatever parliament might say.

If the church wants to live by the sword of gratuitous insult, then it ought to be prepared to see itself nicked by the smaller infinitely less powerful pinpricks of protest.

Roy Zimmerman: Defenders of Marriage

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...

DICO day: impressions

The day after, there's the usual war of numbers: 20,000 according to the police, 80,000 for the organisers; La Repubblica's settled on 50,000. Whoever may be right (and I'd go with La Repubblica), Piazza Farnese was jammed with adults, children, dogs taking part in the protest in favour of civil unions, currently under attack from the centre-right, the Vatican and elements within the cnetre-left government, notably the Minister of Justice, Clemente Mastella (whose party polled 1.4% of votes in the last election), and Opus Dei member Paola Binetti, centre-left senator and, god help us, psychiatrist, who recently announced that homosexuality was deviant behaviour (and who is also known as a self-flagellant). The mood was contained, static, even dull; certainly not festive, despite the presence of a score or so of rainbow banners. A stall was selling the usual T-shirts, with Che Guevara, surely no homophile, prominent among them. Most of the flags belonged to political factions within the governing coalition (the Rose in the Fist, Rifondazione Comunista, the Greens), although several handwritten banners showed a camper, less party aligned spirit.

We were there to tell the government that civil unions are still on the agenda, whatever the Vatican and Andreotti might think, and three government ministers were there to tell us how right we were, although the promised presence of some centre-right representatives remained unfulfilled. It's obviously a cross-party issue, though, and it will be interesting to see how people vote when a bill of some sort reaches parliament. Cecchi Paone, television presenter and Forza Italia MP, apparently had a hissy fit and left the stage, but this was set so low only a privileged few could see it. There were very few police and some of those present were parked as usual outside the home of Cesare Previti, corrupter of judges and Berlusconi sidekick; the scaffolding against his building had the largest banner of the day, announcing Io DICO Zapatero! The Spanish PM was definitely the event's patron saint, and placards to his sanctity were scattered throughout the crowd.

There were none of the usual leather chaps framing bare bums, disco bunnies and male-on-male snogging that, for better or worse, tend to characterise gay protests, though I did see one couple of youngish men share a fairly chaste kiss. This was only fitting. After all, the law--if it ever exists--won't only protect gay couples, as civil partnerships do in the UK, but any two people bound by 'affective ties'. Even the highly-publicised wake-up alarm, which went off at six with the help of clocks, mobiles, etc, felt angry rather than shrill.

The only sour note occurred later, as Peppe and I walked through the centre of Rome. We were just past the Pantheon when we heard a waiter announce to no one in particular that Rome was full of queers. And today, there's news of the arrest of the latest Rumanian rentboy-cum-murderer, obliged to kill a man forty years older than he is to protect his honour. Business as usual in the shadow of the Vatican.

The tyranny of conscience

Umberto Galimberti has an interesting piece in today's Repubblica, which unfortunately doesn't seem to appear on the paper's website. He talks about the way people claim to be unable to do certain things or behave in a certain way because it would go against their conscience. The cases he mentions are Italian, and recent, but the issues his argument touches on - euthanasia, abortion, civil unions - reach far beyond a single country and time. I'll translate a bit for you. (I hate translating, so I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I'm making on your behalf.)

So what is this 'conscience'? It is the tyranny of the principle of subjectivity that refuses to accept any form of collective responsibility and the consequences that derive from it. The doctor who, as a "conscientious objector" refuses to perform an abortion on a woman living in absolute poverty with too many children already, on a barely pubescent child, on someone whose foetus is deformed, refuses to take responsibility for the condition of the mother and the future unhappiness of the child, considering nothing but his principles, which allow him to feel comfortable with his 'conscience', precisely because they suppress, deny, refuse to see the consequences of his decision. [...]

If the tyranny of the subjective 'conscience', which in the name of its own principles is incapable of mediation and takes no responsibility for social issues (such as civil unions and the right to die), becomes an absolute principle in politics, [...] we need to make it very clear that those who bow to this tyranny have no place in politics, because their conscience ignores collective responsibility in favour of individual principles.

The essence of politics is 'mediation', not 'bearing witness'. There are other more appropriate places, such as one's private life, in which to 'bear witness'. [...] As Kant said: 'Morality is made for man, not man for morality'. This is even truer of ideology.

Crikey, Kant. Twice in one day.

Fasten your seatbelts...

Well, it’s better than nothing. The proposed new bill to regulate civil unions isn’t perfect, but compromise isn’t intended to produce perfection - what compromise is intended to produce is the illusion of perfectibility. The only people whose noses are seriously out of joint are the non possumus brigade, whose episcopal hissy-fitting has influenced the form of the bill (and some of its substance), but not, if the metaphor isn’t too inappropriate, induced its abortion.

It remains to be seen whether further trans-Tiber dealings will prevent the bill from becoming law. The neo-theo-dem-cons on the centre left (and God only knows what they’re doing there) can sigh with relief that the bill doesn’t institute a separate register for civil unions, alongside – and in competition with - that for married couples. But it’s unlikely that their spiritual mentors will settle for such an Italian solution.

I see a bumpy ride ahead.

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.