The debate about same-sex marriages/civil unions in Italy’s 2006 and 2013 electoral campaigns

Abstract

Issues related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights have for a long time been taboo in Catholic Italy, and they began to be debated in the mainstream media only after the organisation of a gay pride march in Rome during the 2000 jubilee. In the years since, the subject has become a bone of contention between the centre-left and the centre-right parties. In particular, a heated debate developed before and immediately after the 2006 parliamentary elections, when the centre-left coalition included parties -such as the Partito Radicale (Radical Party) and Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation) -willing to approve a law giving legal recognition to same-sex couples, while, on the other hand, the centre-right relied strongly on 'traditional values' in order to garner votes. After that discussion, the issue was revived only during the campaign for the 2013 elections, when Nichi Vendola, the former Communist -and openly gay -leader of Sinistra, Ecologia e Libertà (the Left Ecology and Freedom), included in the centre-left coalition, put the problem on the political agenda again, without success in policy terms. This article will analyse the frames adopted by the various political actors to address the issue in the two campaigns, trying to understand the peculiarities of the two phases of the debate. In particular, it will show that there has been an evolution in the political actors' ideas of marriage that could lead to the adoption of a law on same-sex civil unions in Italy in the near future.

Is Right-wing Populism a Phenomenon of Religious Dissent? The Cases of the Lega and the Rassemblement National

“…On the other hand, the choice to harshly criticize the Vatican on immigration-and multiculturalism-related issues has aligned with the positions of some ultraconservative Catholics who are not at ease with Pope Francis's management of the Church (and, more broadly, with post-conciliary Catholicism). This has undoubtedly catered on strains and polarization probably already existing within the Italian Catholic community, and exasperated them (Ozzano, 2019(Ozzano, , 2016. As a consequence, this orientation has put the party -at least in some fieldsin a position of competition with the Church hierarchies in defining what it means to be an engaged Christian in today's Italy.…”

“…As a consequence, the LN engaged not only against LGBT+ rights, but also against medically assisted procreation and stem cell research, in favor of the crucifix in public classrooms, and in support of the inclusion of a reference to 'the Christian roots' of Europe in the preamble to the draft EU constitution (Ozzano and Giorgi 2016). Its main focus, however, became the struggle against Islamic immigration, and the public signs of its presence in Europe, particularly in terms of places of worship and dress code: a target which however in the LN discourse was not rarely merged with LGBT+ issues (as already shown in the above quoted Bossi speech) and even abortion rights to polemicize against EU and national elites (allegedly willing to lower the birth rate in European countries and to favour Muslim immigration, in order to deconstruct the family-based 'traditional society') (Ozzano 2016).…”

“…This time, the coalition also included a party, Left, Ecology and Freedom (Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà -SEL) which was led by an outspoken homosexual and pro-LGBT+ rights activist, Nichi Vendola, who during the campaign did not refrain from stressing the issue, also at the personal level, in reference to his desire to marry his partner. 11 Moreover, Pope Francis's Vatican seemed much less focused on sexuality and morality issues than it was in the previous decade, and the Church representatives now often signified their opposition in terms of priorities and opportunities in times of economic crisis, rather than 'natural law' and 'common good' as they had done in the 2000s (Ozzano and Giorgi 2016;Ozzano 2015). This paved the way for an even harsher divide between the positions of the party and the Vatican, which however mostly centered around immigration and multiculturalism-related issues.…”

“…This mounting opposition within the Church has also triggered growing polarization among the community of believers itself. In this case, the main cleavage is often between practising believers, who recognize religious leaders as the ultimate source of authority, and occasionally practicing and non-practising believers, who prioritize political ideologies and an identity-driven idea of Catholicism (Ozzano 2019(Ozzano , 2016.…”

Religious Barriers to the Diffusion of Same-sex Civil Unions in Italy

“…To the best of the authors' knowledge, the literature dealing with the Italian case has mainly focused on the legal aspects of the new law (Cipriani 2017;Saporiti 2017), on the political debate that led to its approval (Ozzano 2015;Schmitt et al 2013;Lasio and Serri 2017), on the psychological barriers to becoming parents for LGBT people (Scandurra et al 2019), and on the relationship between post-materialism and diffusion of same-sex civil unions (Pagliacci 2019), but there is a lack of work investigating the relation between secularization and the diffusion of civil unions.…”