Foot and mouth disease

I've been on the point of writing something about the whole paedophile scandal for a couple of weeks now, but really, why bother? The Vatican is doing such a good job of shooting itself in the foot - yes, that's right, the one it's managed to jam into its own mouth - that additional comment from me seems superfluous. Let them get on with it, say I. Ratzinger and his gang of frocked deniers have managed to anger just about everyone and mollify no one so far, something I'd never have dreamed of achieving with my own humble sniping from my own very small rooftop 100 miles away from Ground Control by the Tiber.

So I'm not even going to comment on the latest nonsense from a certain Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (seen here with friends), who claims that a clear link has been found between paedophilia and homosexuality but not between paedophilia and celibacy (except perhaps to point out that if you're celibate, darling, you're not having sex with anyone). In fact, the only clear link I can find in this whole sad business is the one between a bunch of frightened old men whose authority is being challenged and the spouting of malicious bullshit.

And that's not a comment. That's science.

Vatican update!

The Vatican has been having a bit of a rough time these past few days. News arrives from Poland that the 'miracle' needed to sanctify GP2 smells a bit fishy, news that has been roundly denied by B16. In 2006, it was claimed that the wandering Pole had cured a French nun of Parkinson's disease, described by GP2 as 'another sign of God's creativity'. Now it looks as though the nun might not even have had Parkinson's disease, suggesting that the creative one isn't God, but his earthly representatives. They'll have to fish around in the tub of other purported wonder cures to see what they can find. Maybe evangelist Benny Hinn has one he can spare, when he's finished talking to his divorce lawyers and counting his money.

As if this wasn't enough, tapes have just been published of conversations in which a Vatican chorister (correction: ex-Vatican chorister), a certain Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, known to his friends as 'Mike', has been pimping men at the rate of two or three a week for Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of his Holiness (correction: ex-Gentleman of his Holiness), known to his friends as 'Brenda', and deeply implicated in the latest wave of corruption scandals to fail to rock Italy*. Balducci's tastes are eclectic. Among the men that seem to have been procured by Ehiem are two black Cubans, a RAI dancer and a professional footballer, not to mention assorted seminarians. Still, he doesn't seem that easy a man to please. Ehiem's sidekick, Lorenzo Renzi, apparently told one of the lucky hookers to take the Viagra and not to touch the Gentleman's (correction: ex-Gentleman's) balls. Fussy! In a possibly related item, the Ratisbonne boys' choir appears to have been a hotbed of under-age sexual abuse under the direction of B16's brother, Georg, who ran the show from 1964 to 1993. Now why does the name Georg ring a bell?

And there's no cake without a small and delectable fruit perched on the top. In this case, the cherry is the news that money squirrelled away by Diego Anemone, one of the leading figures in the Italian Civil Protection corruption scandal and currently enjoying the comforts of a cell not that far from Balducci's, has been found in the safe of don Evaldo Biasini. (That's don as in catholic priest, not mafioso. I know, I know...) Something like a million euros was hidden behind a religious painting in the office of the priest, who just happens to be responsible for the financial affairs of an organization called the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Ever-so Precious Blood of Jesus. Where do I start?

* One of these facts about Balducci isn't true. Guess which!

Love came down

Are you enjoying the latest cat-fight as much as I am? I'm talking about the one between the Vatican and the Northern League, after Roberto Calderoli, minister for simplification (and they don't come much simpler than Calderoli) criticised Milan's Cardinal Tettamanzi. Tettamanzi upset Calderoli by suggesting that in God's sight all men were equal, or something equally inflammatory, and forgot to add that obviously he wasn't referring to those born outside the mythical state of Padania, where men are men and have tigers in their garden, not to speak of she-bears and the odd wild pig. Calderoli's the man on the left. He's the man who took off his shirt on TV to reveal an anti-Islamic tee-shirt and then ran crying to Mummy when the Muslim world reacted badly, the way bullies always do when their bluff is called. He says that it isn't the job of priests to 'be political'. You know, the old 'Give to Caesar' line.Which didn't stop the Lega drawing on the Vatican's persuasive powers when it came to throwing out the idea of living wills in this country, or getting on its high horse about 'Christian traditional values' when the EU told Italy to take its crucifixes out of the classroom. Well, Roberto, one of those traditional values you hold so dear is hospitality to strangers, not clubbing them over the head and deporting them to Libya. Christianity isn't just for Christmas, Caldy. And I don't just mean White Christmas.

Mind you, Tettamanzi's words would ring a little truer if the Vatican bank weren't under investigation for money laundering.

Shut yo' mouth, Part Two

Silvio Berlusconi has just taken the extraordinary step of suing Repubblica on the grounds that the ten questions the newspaper has been asking him (click to embiggen above or see here) since the Papi-and-Noemi shit hit the fan last February are 'diffamatory'. His argument, or that of his weasel-faced legal adviser, Ghedini, is that the questions are 'rhetorical' and designed 'not to obtain a response' from Berlusconi but to 'insinuate in the reader the idea that the person "interrogated" refuses to respond'.

This is the kind of casuistical horseshit lawyers are paid to produce - it ought to be clear to anyone that Berlusconi's refusal to respond is not an 'idea' but a fact - so we shouldn't be surprised. What is surprising is that Berlusconi should have chosen to kick up a legal fuss now, with Repubblica beginning to feel more and more like a voice in the wildnerness here, the RAI increasingly weakened by external and self-censorship and personnel changes, and his own house rags ever more virulently on the attack, slavering and snarling like cornered rats.

The last straw appears to have been a recent piece in which a number of articles from highly-regarded foreign newspapers are quoted, describing the man as a sex-dependent tin-pot dictator in the claws of the Russian mafia. SB, who continues to insist that he has brought nothing but lustre to the image of Italy abroad, a claim that would be laughable if it weren't so readily believed and repeated here in Italy, seems to have decided to try and clamp down on the right of Italian journalists to refer to the work of their colleagues in other countries, isolating the country even more.

In the meantime, the Viagra-riddled geriatric's plans to get a little Vatican cred by dining with some cardinal or other amid the rubble of L'Aquila have been blown away, possibly by Bossi's recent attacks on the Church, guilty of taking a soft line on immigration (!) and attacks on the Vatican-controlled publication Avvenire by the Berlusconi-controlled rag magazine Il Giornale. Let them fight it out among themselves, say I.

The right of the strongest

There's a typically Italian kerfuffle going on here at the moment about the authorisation of Ru486, the pill that induces abortion. It's used pretty much everywhere in the developed world, but Italy's taken its time about saying yes, for obvious reasons. It's a political issue here (yawn), which is what women tend to become when their bodies,and their right to make decisions about them, are involved. I'd call the issue ideological but that gives too much weight to the knee-jerkiness of most of the reactions here, in the world of opinion-makers, inside and outside the Vatican, if such a space as 'outside the Vatican' exists in Italy in anything but the most virtual sense (i.e blogs). Because it isn't ideological at all; it's a question of who swings what, and where. It's party lines and party funding and who gives a flying fuck about individual women and their complicated individual lives?

For some people, for example, doctors and cardinals and their various acolytes and dependents (politicians), the use of the pill 'banalizes' abortion. At this point, it might not be a bad idea to cut the crap and introduce the proviso that legal abortion is available as long as it's accompanied by a public flogging and a rather severe haircut. That way the woman won't regard it as 'banal', and will presumably think twice before having sex. Because naturally, before having sex, she'll take into account the fact that she might be able to avoid a surgical procedure and replace it with a slightly less invasive sort of medication. Good God, who wouldn't risk it, knowing that? I'm surprised Papi Silvio doesn't slip a pill into the bustarella he gives the whores he entertains in his many villas. Banal, schmanal, as long as she doesn't do a paternity suit. The chance, as they say, would be a fine thing, despite Berlusconi's latest crack that he may not be a saint, but he fucks like a god. (Yes, this is the Italian premier speaking...)

But my favourite is the comment made by Bagnasco. He's the cardinal who took over from God's ferret a couple of years ago in a PR attempt to soften the rigour of the Prada-clad One, who is currently nursing his over-stressed wrist somewhere comfortable. In the photograph above, he's the one in the red sash sucking up to the boss, in white. They're quite a picture, surounded by all that sombre but not unsexy black. These colours wouldn't matter, but they have a hierarchical significance, rather like judo. And that's what makes me laugh about Bagnasco. His reaction to the decision to allow the use of the pill was to express his bitterness that it endorsed 'the right of the strongest'. Coming from a democrat this just might have had some weight. It's certainly true that a pregnant woman is 'stronger' than a foetus, if only because she's a reasoning autonomous being and not a mere cluster of cells. Coming from a man at the highest ranks of a rigidly hierarchical structure that regards all women within its bounds as lesser beings, deprived of decision-making power and doctrinal choice, a structure that will do all it can to reduce women outside its bounds, who don't even share its faith, to the same level, as unspeaking, unquestioning vessels of God's word and man's seed, it's no longer laughable. It's obscene.

Here we go again

Last year, for the most absurd reasons (a choral recital in a nearby building, if I remember rightly), under evident pressure from the Vatican and the post-fascist mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, Rome Gay Pride was denied the use of Piazza San Giovanni. The mean-spirited sods are trying it on again this year, eleven days before the march is due to take place, in an attempt to effectively cancel the event. I've been asked to pass this message on to you by the SUPPORT ROMA PRIDE 2009, and that's what I'm doing. If you don't want Rome to look like Moscow or Tehran, you know what to do. And if you're on Facebook, you can join up here. 

Dear friends,

As some of you already know the 13th of June is the date of Roma Pride 2009, but at the moment, only ten days before the event, we still have no authorized route for the final parade and march. Yesterday the police autorities again denied authorization, for the third time, with reasons that are no more than absurd excuses.

As well as the usual Pride issues, such as visibility, rights, non discrimination and equality for LGBT people and communities, we face a conservative attack on basic democratic and civil rights, as guaranteed by the Italian Constitution and the international conventions. Again Piazza San Giovanni has been denied because of the veto of the Vatican and clerical authorities. However, last year's route from Piazza della Repubblica to Piazza Navona has also been denied this year, making it almost impossible the march to take place, and damaging the democratic and civil rights of all Italian citizens, not just GLBT people.

We really need moral support from all of you, and from abroad.You can support Roma Pride 2009 by writing your personal or associative support to romapride@gmail.com (you can send a copy also to me at a.maccarrone@mariomieli.org), by spreading and forwarding this message to other people, above all other groups or associations, GLBT groups, Pride organisers, activists for civil and human rights, politicians, journalists that may be interested in this topic, and by creating mobilization or any other kind of useful iniative at any level.
If you are a journalist or have web sites, blogs, newsletters or acces to any other media, please help us byspreading this information.

Thank you for your support and help,

Andrea Maccarrone

Ave fellow thugs

The back in the middle of this picture belongs to someone called Don Giulio Tam. He defines himself as an 'itinerant Jesuit' but he's actually one of the gang of break-away catholic traditionalists, headed by Lefebvre and recently re-admitted to the fold by Ratzinger. He looks as though he's calling for order or maybe directing traffic in this picture, but what he's actually doing is making a Roman salute, the kind Mussolini made fashionable all those years ago, to a group of right-wing extremists (sorry, Forza Nuova) in Bergamo. What with Archbishop Robinson et al, it looks as though, for the Vatican, blackshirts are the new black. 

These must be prayer sticks.

Death and the state

Last December I posted on the case of Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who had been in a state of vegetative coma for the past seventeen years, following a car accident when she was twenty. After years of legal to-ing and fro-ing, buck-passing and prevarication, her father, Beppino, finally obtained permission last July to discontinue treatment and allow his daughter to die, in accordance with her own verbally expressed wishes. 

When I wrote my post, the Minister of Welfare, Maurizio Sacconi, a man who had previously shown no marked religious inclinations, was threatening to close the clinic in which the treatment - a pharmaceutical substance providing nutrition and preventing dehydration - was to be withdrawn, despite the fact that Italy's supreme court, the Cassazione, had authorised its discontinuance. According to Sacconi, the state could neither condone nor authorise murder. In any case, said Sacconi, as the self-elected mouthpiece for the Vatican, Eluana's life belonged not to her, but to God.

Since then, and despite a public consensus that, perhaps surprisingly, ignored the anathema of Italy's increasingly vociferous pulpits and sustained Beppino Englaro's struggle, the situation has developed into one that threatens not only the right of one woman to die but the entire democratic structure of Italy, such as it is. Over the last few day, flying in the face of Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, and the warnings of constitutionalists, Berlusconi and his government have been involved in an attempt to improvise a one-paragraph law to 'save Eluana'. The attempt was interrupted by her death, yesterday evening, two days after treatment had been stopped, as a result of cardiac arrest.

It may be the case that some of the people who fought and shouted and legiferated for Eluana's body to be medicated and watered, washed and treated and turned two, three times a day, for her hair and nails to be clipped and her bodily wastes removed - it may be that some of them genuinely believed she was alive in some meaningful way, and that the right to die should be denied not only to the sentient, as is still the case in Italy, but also to the mindless larva Eluana had become. And there's a sort of sentimental absolutism about that position that might even be worth respecting if it weren't applied so readily, and so cruelly, to those who don't share such a belief and abandoned with such alacrity when the body in question is that of a pope or potential saint. 

It may even be the case that some of the religious figures who are now praying that their ever merciful God forgive Beppino Englaro - defined, with infinite understanding, as 'both judge and executioner' by the Vatican house organ today  - it may be that some of these cardinals and bishops actually believe in the sanctity of life so certainly, so irrefutably, that even the mechanical ticking-over of a body incapable of thought and emotional response is considered to be a life worth living, whatever the views of the body's owner, now irretrievable, and of those closest to them, their family and friends and loved ones.

But it certainly isn't the case that Berlusconi - who announced that Eluana was 'still able to have children' as though fertility and the ability to be impregnated were the final measure of a woman's value -  cared one jot about Eluana's right to live. And it certainly isn't the case that politicians like Gasparri and Mantovano, who, until a handful of years ago, belonged to a party that claimed direct descent from a regime that denied not the right to die but the right to live to hundreds of thousands of Jewish fellow citizens, and homosexuals, and communists, and gypsies, have the interests of Eluana Englaro in mind when they scream 'Murderer' at her father. 

Because it isn't the dignity of life that's being defended here, but the vulgar and unseemly - for want of a stronger word - interests of a caste. And when that caste, in its efforts to subvert the constitution and with the assistance of a power-obsessed clerical hierarchy, is prepared to take advantage of the lingering death of a woman and the suffering and civil conscience of her family, it isn't difficult to recognise who's standing on the moral high ground.

Intimacy

Some weeks before Christmas, well past the watershed, RAI2, one of the Italian state TV channels, showed Brokeback Mountain. Well, actually, it didn't. It showed a version of Brokeback Mountain shorn of its moments of intimacy. Brokeback Mountain without intimacy is another film entirely, and this was pointed out to the head of RAI2, who claimed it was all a terrible mistake - the bowdlerised copy had been prepared for another section of the RAI (presumably under total Vatican control) - and would be remedied forthwith. I've been told by a RAI director that it's damn nigh impossible that a film be broadcast without its having been seen by someone, but why should I doubt the word of a regime whore respected professional. If that's what he says, that must be the way it was.

We're still waiting to see the film as Ang Lee, and Annie Proulx, intended it, but who knows what the new year may bring. In the meantime, I discovered yesterday, from an article in the Observer, that Cuban state television has shown Brokeback Mountain without cuts. Cuba Libre.

Seventeen years

Earlier this year I wrote a brief post about a man called Giuliano Ferrara. Ferrara really isn't that interesting, except as an over-exposed example of chronic brown-nosing that would take some beating even in Italy, and I wouldn't bring him up again if I didn't have good reason, believe me. But I mentioned the grotesque buffoon at the time because of his typically vulgar reaction to a court decision to allow Beppino Englaro to finally cease the forced nutrition and hydration of his daughter, Eluana, after seventeen years in a state of vegetative coma. That was 15 July.

Five months later, Eluana Englaro continues to have food and water pumped into her, against the wishes of her family and against the expressed wishes of Eluana herself, when she was in a position to express wishes. During these five months, Beppino Englaro has been forced to negotiate an obstacle course of such deliberate, appalling cruelty, masterminded by the Vatican and with the all-too-willing connivance of its representatives in the Italian government, on both sides of the political divide, if such a distinction makes sense any longer in a country in which the most basic democratic rules are flouted daily. A campaign designed to prolong the agony of a man whose only interest is his daughter, supported by some of the worst Italy and the catholic church has to offer, from Ratzinger to Binetti to Ferrara and their merry gang of fundamentalist hypocrites. The final straw came yesterday, after the Supreme Court had, once again, given the go-ahead for treatment to be stopped. Minister of Welfare, Maurizio Sacconi*, ex-socialist and with the moral apparatus of a sea-urchin, announced that government funding would be withdrawn from any clinic that dared put the court ruling into practice. This was greeted by some cardinal whose name I can't be bothered to look for as "a reasonable and sensible decision", immediately making him a candidate for slow rotting in his own hell. 

The latest news is that, after having sought legal advice, a clinic in Udine is prepared to, finally, satisfy the wishes of Eluana and her father, with a team of anonymous volunteers taking medical responsibility. 

*Sacconi's wife, in the meantime, is president of Farmindustria, the association that protects the interest of the pharmaceutical industry.

Money

Well, it's good to be reminded once again who really runs Italy. When it emerged that the Treasury was planning to reduce the amount of funding provided by the Italian state to catholic schools, it took no more than a few hours for a papal hissy fit to change their minds. According to Ratzy, the church's right to our money is 'inalienable'. Well, I'd have preferred the word 'indefensible', but there you go. You don't argue with the boss.

(Seen here, preparing a primal gift for Christmas.)

Iran, Jamaica, Vatican, Sudan....

Surprise news from the Holy See. Someone called (Father) Federico Lombardi claims that the Vatican's refusal to endorse a proposal for the UN that homosexuality be decriminalised, signed by all EU states, presumably including Poland (!), does not mean that it approves of the death penalty for homosexuals. Phew. Its position on waterboarding hasn't yet been announced. 

While we're waiting, read Wendell Ricketts' comment on the whole sordid business here.

Ditching the bitch

This time PD senator Paola "Mrs Doubtfire" Binetti (see two posts down) really does seem to have gone too far. Following her comment that homosexuals couldn't control their paedophilic instincts and were therefore disqualified from becoming priests, members of her centre-left party have called for her to be expelled. (Better late than never. If they'd done it two years ago we might, just might, have civil union legislation in place in Italy.) She's going to be hauled up before an internal commission tomorrow and asked to explain herself. 

Binetti's used to waffling on uninterrupted, under the assumption that religious bigotry has a sort of authority denied other forms of bullying, and can't quite see what she's done wrong. She's apologised, after all, even though she has used the apology to repeat the slur. She even seems to think there's some sort of scientific validity in what she says, although it wouldn't matter if there weren't because, well, she just know she's right. She must be. She's only repeating what the pope says, after all. And he's always right. Why? Because he says he is. That's what infallibility's all about.

An expert speaks

I've had occasion in the past to talk about Paola Binetti, Democratic Party (PD) senator here in Italy, and the prime mover in blocking civil union legislation during Prodi's ill-fated government. Well, after a period of relative silence, during which she was presumably adjusting her self-mortification equipment in the privacy of her own monastic (nunnistic?) cell, she's back and talking more rot than ever. Commenting on the recent announcement that the Vatican would screen potential priests to exclude those with "deeply rooted homosexual tendencies" (as opposed to the shallow, frivolous, Kylie-loving, Prada-wearing kind), she told yesterday's Corriere della Sera that "deeply rooted homosexual tendencies presuppose the presence of an instinct that may become uncontrollable. This is where the risk of paedophilia springs from." She also thinks that heterosexual paedophilia is far less common than the deeply rooted homosexual kind. How much longer is this woman going to be allowed to spew forth such pernicious hate-filled nonsense without being expelled from the PD? Yes, I realise how sadly rhetorical this question is, but if you'd like to make things at least a little hot for her, one thing you can do is join the Facebook group asking for her removal. 

Jam and jewels

The EU is looking into why religious education teachers in Italian schools receive preferential treatment: less rigorous selection (they're handpicked by the local bishop) and better salaries. Not that they do teach religion, any more than a geography teacher who just does, say, rivers actually teaches geography. They teach catholicism. And not teach as in "opening minds". Teach as in "indoctrinate".

This is the second EU investigation into the way the catholic church gets kid-gloved in Italy. The other one, set up a couple of years ago, is looking into the tax breaks given to church-run hotels, schools, massage parlours (well, maybe not massage parlours), quite apart from the inordinately large slab of money it receives from Italian tax payers in the first place. Ratzinger was drivelling on about what a terrible thing money was yesterday, to a bunch of old men dripping gold and velvet, clapping their bejewelled paws, stamping their Prada'd feet. So why not give some back, Eggs? Instead of putting political pressure on the EU, via its parliamentary goons in Italy, to persuade it to leave the Vatican's coffers alone?

Roman salute

I don't live in Rome any more and many of the years I did spend in the city it was ruled by a series of insipid Christian Democrats, their names forgotten, more interested in nest-feathering than the fate of Caput Mundi. The place felt much as it must have done when sheep grazed in the Colosseum and the barbarians were a distant, fond memory. Since then, it's been put on its feet by two centre-left mayors: Francesco Rutelli and Walter Veltroni. The centre's been transformed in the past fifteen years, not always for the better. Some of the most characteristic parts of the city - such as Campo de' Fiori - have been sacrificed in the name of health and safety. Public transport could still be improved, though it remains notably cleaner, faster and cheaper than that in London. (Not, I repeat, not than that in Paris.) It's a far pleasanter place to be than Milan, ex-capital in all but name and gone to the dogs in the past twenty years. It's been shown to be one of the safest cities in Europe and, I think, the safest capital.

So what went wrong? Why did Rome turn its back on Rutelli and elect neo-fascist Gianni Alemanno, an ex-squadrista with a list of arrests for political violence as long as your arm, proud bearer of the Celtic cross (see left), a minister in Berlusconi 's last government, the son-in-law of Pino Rauti, suspected train bomber and founder of Ordine Nuovo? I don't know, and if you want an answer you'll find a lot of finer and more informed political brains than mine only too happy to provide one. I don't know, but. But.

I'd blame a lot of the defeat on the decision to re-propose Francesco Rutelli. The first time round, he was young, innovative, attractive in a rather square-jawed knitting-pattern way. He still had the air of resistance to the institutions that he'd acquired as blue-eyed protégé to Marco Panella. Since then, he's lost an election to Berlusconi, he's shifted from a secular and radical position on civil issues to the kind of half-witted bigotry you get from 'teodems' like Paola Binetti. He's become a mouthpiece for the most blinkered and conservative elements in Italian society. Who needs him? I have nothing but admiration for all those Romans who held their noses while putting a cross beside the man's name, but it can't have been easy. Next to Rutelli, even Gianni Alemanno might look like a new broom. Albeit one in the sweeping hands of Berlusconi, Bossi and the Vatican (whose current CEO also has a rather murky fascist past).

If Veltroni wanted the PD to look like a paradigm shift in Italian politics he couldn't have picked a worse candidate than the mealy-mouthed institutionalised has-been he chose. It was a lazy decision, and a contemptuous one. And now both Rome and the entire country will have to live with the consequences.

Fright

It's standard practice in the run-up to elections for opposition leaders to accuse the government of practically anything short of first degree homicide (pace Andreotti), knowing full well that retaliation only makes the retaliator look pathetic. It's an old playground trick, and politicians know full well that mud doesn't need to contain a grain of truth to stick. But trust Berlusconi to come up with a new twist on the old technique. Interviewed by Tempi, he announced that the Prodi government had 'frightened people with its fight against tax evasion.' This might well be the first true thing the man has said, and is likely to say, in the entire campaign, which began only minutes after the last general elections in April 2006. But to accuse a government of 'frightening' wrongdoers in a bid to become, once again, prime minister of one of the world's most powerful countries, despite all his efforts during his previous term, surely takes the biscuit for sheer bare-facedness. He might as well have accused it of scaring men by increasing women's rights (except that it hasn't) or heterosexuals by recognising civil unions (idem).

And talking about women's rights, the Great Buffoon also pledged support to the suggestion of his tubby chum, opinionista Giuliano Ferrara, that an international moratorium be called on abortion, or 'murdering babies', as it's sometimes known. This has as much chance of passing as a moratorium on farting in private, but it's an easy way to say thank you forthe support he's already getting from the Vatican rag, Avvenire. And the latest news is that Ferrara, who has no children, is going to be running as a pro-life candidate. Well, here's photographic proof that he can do it. Run, that is.

Abortion

An awful lot of men -old men, obese men, childless men, opinionated men - are talking about abortion in Italy right now. I don't think it's any of their business, and I don't think it's any of mine.

Bananas

As predicted in my last post, Clemente Mastella has withdrawn his three (yes, that's right, three) senators from the Italian senate, depriving the Prodi government of its majority of two (yes, that's right, two). The government's been looking like a house of cards in a gentle but insistent breeze for some time and this will probably be the final puff, though there is a slight chance of a 'technical' (as in, non-elected) government being cobbled together to vote through some sort of electoral reform. The only good that might come from such a solution would be an electoral law that prevented self-serving ingrates like Mastella from holding the whip hand with their fistfuls of bought or bartered votes.

It was clear from the beginning of this legislature that the greatest threat to its survival came not from the left, responsible for bringing down Prodi's first government, but from the centre, a haemorrhoid-like cluster of mini-parties, most of whose leaders are, or have been, investigated for corruption, favouritism or collusion (Mastella, Dini, Di Pietro). The left has had to grit its teeth and vote for any number of unpalatable provisions simply to keep Prodi in power. It's seen parts of the electoral manifesto - such as support for civil unions - scrapped. It's even toed the line over foreign policy decisions that would have brought Prodi 1 down in two shakes of a snake's tail, alienating substantial chunks of its own electorate in the process. To its credit, it's understood that real politik is based on compromise, rather than unbending principle.

Not that the centre's obstructionism and wheeler-dealing has had anything to do with principle. The way Mastella and his merry gang have behaved over the last two years, as though the Italian parliament were part of their personal fiefdom, is simply cringe-making to watch. There is nothing such men wouldn't do to be able to continue to dispense largesse and rake in the profits from it, which, as often as not, have as much to do with the exhilarating buzz of power as they do with cash. (Not that they're short of that.) There are rumours already that Mastella and Berlusconi are brokering some squalid little deal which will ensure the former's political survival. To counter this, and to show the extent to whoch Italian politics is contingent on private interests, there is talk that some of the teeny-weenier parties of the right might, just might, be tempted to cross over to the centre-left and keep it alive for another month or so. Naturally, they'd be rewarded.

The cherry on the cake is that the head of the Italian Episcopal Council, Bagnasco, has informed the electorate (Italy's electorate, naturally - the Vatican's subjects don't get to vote) that the church will not tolerate civil unions, etc. etc. Nobody asked him, he just thought he'd remind us. Oh yes, the church will also oppose any attempt to introduce the notion of gender into Italian law; apparently it remains entirely Christian to insult and disscriminate against gay men and women with impunity. How far the Vatican is from Fred Phelps and his God Hates Fags gang is a moot point. Richard Dawkins would say they're the same thing and, until I hear an awful lot of dissent from grassroots catholics - something that's signally absent at the moment - I'd tend to agree with him.

Today is the first birthday of my blog. I was going to celebrate but I'm sick to the stomach about all this. I've never been less in love with Italy than I am today. I don't even want to begin to talk about the toxic rubbish in Naples. I'd be unable to resist a metaphor that's better left implicit. I'll just post a picture and you can do the creative business yourselves.

More papal bull

It's Ratzinger's week. Not content with assuming the position (see below), he's stirred up a hornet's nest at La Sapienza, Rome and Italy's largest university. Invited to the inauguration of the academic year (which, typically, takes place months after it's actually begun) by Rector Guarini, himself currently under investigation for corruption and no doubt eager for a little pontifical indulgence, B16 is going to have to deal with demonstrations and all kinds. Why? Initially, because a group of physics professors pointed out in a letter to la Repubblica that, according to Ratzinger, the church did the right thing with Galileo, which would tend to exclude him from the cradle of rationality and scientific progress that a secular seat of learning such as a state university represents, in theory at least. Since the letter was published, a lot of other people in the university have expressed similar doubts about the need to invite the obscurantist leader of a non-democratic foreign state to its opening day. More power to their elbow, say I.

Naturally, there are those who defend his presence, insisting that not to invite him would be tantamout to censorship. How many times must it be said that censorship means preventing someone from communicating his or her ideas in an absolute sense? It isn't censorhip if the Daily Mail chooses not to host the writing of Noam Chomsky. It isn't censorship if the Vatican chooses not to invite Vladimir Luzuria to its Christmas shindig. It's common sense, editorial policy, institutional policy, whatever. It's perfectly licit to prefer not to invite a man whose opnions run counter to everything a university should stand for. In any case, the word of Ratzinger hardly goes unheard. The man's a total media tart, rarely off the TV screen or out of the press, his every querulous fart apparently worthy of national attention.

The amusing thing is that his defenders refer to him as an academic. Of what? Theology? Next year I imagine they'll be inviting an astrologer or someone who can read the entrails of slaughtered goats on the grounds that these are also rigorous academic disciplines. And talking of cultural pluralism and open-mindedness, which is what Ratzinger's critics are accused of lacking (hah!), it's interesting to see that one of Rome's most historic art cimemas, il Labirinto, is being forced to close because the proprietors of the building want to replace it with something more profitable. And who are the proprietors? That's right. The Vatican.