Italian court rules that Tuscan city must accept gay ‘marriage’ contracted in New York
ROME, – A court in the Tuscan city of Grosseto has ordered the city council to accept the “marriage” of two men, the first time such a union has been given juridical recognition in Italy.
Giancarlo Cerrelli, vice president of the Catholic Lawyer’s Guild, says the ruling is a “creative judgment that takes no account of the Civil Code and the jurisprudence of the European Union.”
Two homosexual men, Giuseppe Chigiotti and Stefano Bucci, contracted a legal “marriage” ceremony in New York in December last year, then returned to Italy and filed a suit against the town of Grosseto in an attempt to force the issue through the courts. The method has been highly successful in most jurisdictions around the western world, where courts in Canada, the US, Britain, Australia, and across Europe have been used by homosexual activists to overturn laws defining natural marriage.
Despite what some media outlets have claimed, however, both legal experts and homosexual activists recognize that the ruling in itself does not change the law.
“Now it’s up to the mayors who believe in equality to give a result to this ruling,” Arcigay, the country’s leading homosexualist lobby group said in a press statement.
A statement from the office of the mayor of Grosseto, Emilio Bonifazi, said, “We are aware of the importance of this decision, that allows us to overcome the obstacles and difficulties that have emerged so far due to the lack of clear rules that must be followed. The City chose not to oppose the appeal filed by the couple after the rejection of our offices. We will adjust immediately to the decisions of the court without any opposition.”
The chief prosecutor of Grosseto, Francesco Verusio, however, has already said his office will appeal. “There is a judgment of the Supreme Court which clearly says that you cannot do this,” Verusio said. “We are working on the grounds for challenging the judgment of the Court.”
The Grosseto judge wrote, “A marriage between persons of the same sex celebrated abroad is not contrary to public policy.”
But Italy clearly defines marriage in both the constitution and the civil code. Article 29 of the Constitution defines the family as a “natural society founded on marriage.” Article 143 of the Civil Code on the “rights and reciprocal duties of the spouses” identifies these as a “husband” and “wife.”
“There are some insuperable limits that a judge can not cross,” Cerrelli of the Catholic Lawyers’ Guild said. “There is no obligation to Italy to recognize a couple who has entered into a marriage abroad.”
Cerrelli pointed to case law at the European Court of Human Rights that has found member states are under no obligation to recognize same-sex “marriages” contracted in other countries. Last week’s Tuscan court ruling made reference to ECHR rulings as well as a decision by the Italian Supreme Court, but Cerrelli said that in both cases, the decisions cited included the recognition that there is no legal provision in Italy for same-sex “marriage.”
“The ECHR is not an organ of the European Union and therefore its judgments are not immediately binding on the courts of the Member States,” Cerrelli told Tempi.it.
“The ECHR recognizes same-sex marriage, but that does not mean that Italy should do it.” He added that the Constitutional Court of Italy, in its order 138 of 15 April 2010, ruled that the Italian “discipline of marriage postulates the diversity of sex between husband and wife, a ‘consolidation of an extremely ancient [ultramillenaria] notion of matrimony’.”
He quoted the European Convention of Human Rights, which says, “Men and women of full age have the right to marry and to found a family according to the national laws governing the exercise of this right.” He added that the current pressure for member states to accept “gay marriage” is merely a current trend in European judicial circles to interpret other articles of the Convention as including homosexual partnerings.
Cerrelli noted that the European Court of Justice, based in Luxembourg, stated in a April 25, 2013 judgment that the term “marriage” means “a union between two people of different sexes that is not comparable to other forms of unions, and that any difference in treatment must be addressed and resolved at the level of individual rights.”
