Italian town votes to allow gay ‘civil unions’ despite no law allowing it
ROME, May 12, 2014 – The municipal authorities of the city of Crotone in the far south of Italy have voted to allow resident same-sex partners to register as “civil unions,” despite the fact that there is no provision in Italian law for such recognition. Opponents of the move have called it “futile” and ideologically motivated, since such registries would have no legal reality.
On May 6, the town council approved a resolution that said the intention was to “provide for the protection and support of civil unions in order to overcome situations of discrimination and promoting integration into the social, cultural and economic development of the territory.”
“Areas of concern” for the resolution included “housing, health and social services, youth policy, sports, education, school and educational services, rights and participation, transportation.”
It says that the new rule will allow the registry of “civil unions” for “two persons of different sex or of the same sex and cohabiting residents in the city of Crotone not bound together by legal constraints under art. 87 of the Civil Code, but only by bonds of affection.”
The text of the resolution after approval by the Commission to the Presidency of the City Council will now be up for “discussion” at an upcoming City Council meeting. Italy’s Constitution reserves the “civil status and registry” exclusively to state law.
A statement from the Comitato Sì alla Famiglia! (Committee Yes to the family!) warned that the decision to allow the civil registration of same-sex partnerships under the “pretext of avoiding all forms of discrimination” has led the city council to become “the founder of a larger discrimination.”
The group called the decision to register civil unions a “useless tool” that has only “symbolic and ideological purposes.” Family groups up and down Italy have been warning of a government plan, in response to instructions from the Council of Europe, to broadly normalize homosexuality and de-normalize the natural family. This plan was laid out explicitly in a series of documents issued by the racial discrimination office of the Ministry of Equal Opportunities, known as the Ufficio Nazionale Antidiscriminazioni Razziali (UNAR).
The documents said that the goal is to bring the homosexualist ideology, called “gender ideology” by most Italian opponents, into schools and public institutions and the media. The UNAR document for journalists went so far as to threaten professional sanctions and even prison time for those who portray homosexuals and “transexuals” in a bad light. Since these documents were published last year, there has been a rash of actions like that of Crotone at the municipal level, usually organized by the country’s leading homosexualist activist group Arcigay.
Comitato Sì alla Famiglia! called the actions “futile” and “a flop,” noting that the newspaper La Repubblica discovered that in the municipalities such registries have been established, low numbers have demonstrated that they are little more than “ideological devices."
