Italian MPs introduce bill to protect parents’ constitutional rights against confused homosexual ‘gender ideology’
ROME, April 9, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Italian Deputies Eugenia Roccella and Alessandro Pagano have introduced a bill in Parliament that would establish the rights of parents to make decisions about their children’s education, particularly on moral issues.
The move comes in response to increasing concerns by some deputies, parent groups, and civil rights organizations that the government is being co-opted by organized activists to push the so-called “gender ideology” in schools and other Italian institutions.
Eugenia Roccella
The purpose of the bill, Roccella said at a press conference, is to “reaffirm and ensure the fundamental right to educational choice of parents, as set out, inter alia, in the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
Which means in practice, she said, that in all school activities that “relate directly or indirectly to the issues related to relationships, affectivity and sexuality education, and other ethically sensitive issues in general, the parents are informed, who must give their consent in writing to each student.”
The schools must also provide alternative activities for those who choose not to take advantage of extra-curricular activities, “without giving rise to any form of discrimination.”
Roccella is a former feminist activist and past state secretary for health who has long been achampion of life and family causes in Italy’s Parliament, most recently against the proposed “anti-homophobia” law. She is a deputy with the newly-formed Nuovo Centro Destra party (NCD, “New Centre-Right”).
Recently, she and a group of deputies and others have grown increasingly concerned over the sudden incursions of the homosexualist movement’s ideologies into government institutions, particularly through the Ufficio Nazionale Anti Discriminazioni, (UNAR, National Anti-Discrimination Bureau) a body set up by the government to ensure “equality of treatment and the removal of discrimination based on race and ethnic origin.”
Roccella took a leading role in a group of deputies that stopped the UNAR from distributing pro-homosexual school pamphlets, though some city-based initiatives have moved forward in Milan, Turin,Venice and Florence at the behest of local homosexualist organizations.
She explained that the bill is in response to actions taken by the UNAR. Although UNAR’s written prerogatives say that it must act “in full independence of judgment and condition of impartiality,” it has effectively become the strong arm of the gender ideology movement in government, using the law to enforce conformity to a new and alien set of ethics.
Roccella explained in an interview with the website Papaboys 3.0, that the UNAR has been co-opted by gender ideologues to press their aims onto Italian society with the force of law. The UNAR accomplishes this with a “working group made up of 29 homosexual associations,” with no other groups represented to “ensure diversity of opinion and judgment criteria.”
“In this way,” Roccella said, “the UNAR began working independently, to launch the dissemination of brochures such as the ‘Educating for diversity in school,’ which was brought to children without any permission, either from the Ministry of Education, or from the Ministry of Social Policy and completely excluding parents of students.”
Roccella pointed to two UNAR documents, issued in January this year, that have formed the basis of the push into schools, and an attempt to control the message to the public by censoring journalists. These documents were created through collaboration with gender and homosexual activists at the Council of Europe.
The two documents are part of the “National Strategy for the Prevention and the Fight Against Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (2013-2015),” and “Communicating without Prejudice,” which threatened unspecified professional sanctions, and even possible jail time, for those journalists who portrayed homosexuality or “transgenderism” in anything but a positive light. These two documents together, Roccella said, lay out “a real code of political correctness, which masks the reality of self-censorship and forms a platform of ideological conformism.”
The UNAR’s documents on the schools included their stated intention to “instill” in children “the concept that there is no male and female, mother and father, and that the idea that the family is formed by a man and a woman is the result of a homophobic culture.”
These assertions in the two papers, Roccella said, contradict the constitution in its definition of the family – which calls it a “natural society based on marriage” – and undermine motherhood by supporting the concept of the paid “surrogate mother.” Roccella has been a vocal opponent of the push to legalize surrogacy in Parliament, calling it “uterus for rent.” She said that since the UNAR has started issuing its demands, Italy is now seeing the “paradox” of institutions established by the government attempting to ban expression of the country’s own constitution.
She also commented on the case of now-former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, who was “shown the door by his company” after it was revealed that in 2008 he donated $1,000 to support California’s Proposition 8, a referendum that opposed “gay marriage.” Eich, she said, was a victim of a campaign of “undemocratic blackmail” by organizations that “do not tolerate freedom of thought.”
“Faced with so much illiberal violence,” she said, “I want to reaffirm that I am personally opposed to gay marriage, and that in Eich’s shoes I would also have given my support to the battle for the defense of marriage between a man and a woman.”
The intervention of Roccella and other deputies to defend the rights of parents in the nation’s schools is a timely one, said Stefano Zecchi, an author and professor of philosophy at the University of Milan. In an interview with Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, Zecchi said that the extreme left is using these “gender” ideologues to force the public school system to act as a conduit into the minds of young Italians, breaking down foundational civilizational concepts like the family, based on marriage, and replacing them with a foreign, utopian ideology.
“Today in politics there is great difficulty in making sense of cultural differences, so the secularism of the left has just delivered their ideological arsenal on the theme of the abolition of genders. To say that genders are no longer male and female, but even 56 different types becomes the battle for political identity,” Zecchi said.
“As the original leftists truly believed that Communism would save the human race and recognized in it an irreproachable morality, so today they argue that gender prejudice is brutalization.”
For this end, Zecchi said, “the school is particularly targeted by these insane ideologies” that are “the result of the demolition of the father figure that comes from the 70s.” These ideologies, he said, are moving politics into the realm of Darwinian “biologism,” an ideology that is totalitarian at its root.
Ultimately, he said, the logic will lead to the total abolition of any and all sexual restraint in the public sphere: “One day we will come to defend the pedophile – who is after all, a man who pursues his sexual preference – and even incest.”
Zecchi echoed Roccella, saying that under the current law “freedom of education” is a constitutional principle, but that this right of parents to guide their children’s education is coming under direct attack “by a ‘state education’ that would be imposed by the ideologues of gender.” Teachers should be warned that, while they have a duty to stop genuine bullying, “which creates true personal tragedies,” the current push is an attempt to use bullying as a pretext for inserting the “violent ideology” of the extreme left.
“This is becoming a regime and in fact everyone is afraid to fight back, even if only to say that the father is a man and a woman is the mother has become an act of ‘courage.’”
