The debate on the rights and protection of sexual minorities in Italy has been re-ignited.
The Senate de facto rejected the bill to fight homophobia and transphobia in the Senate on Wednesday afternoon.
In a secret ballot, 154 members of the smaller parliamentary chamber voted in favor of rejecting the bill known as “Legge Zan” in its present form.
131 senators voted for the adoption of the law in the version passed by the Chamber of Deputies in November 2020.
Two MPs abstained.
Matthias Rüb
Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.
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The bill is named after the Social Democratic MP Alessandro Zan. The well-known LGBTQ activist introduced the draft to parliament in May 2018. In November 2020, when the left-wing coalition of the five-star movement and social democrats ruled under the non-party Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the law was passed in the House of Representatives with a clear majority. The necessary approval in the Senate was blocked by the Christian-Democratic party Forza Italia of the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the right-wing national Lega of the former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, although both parties belong to the broad governing coalition under Prime Minister Mario Draghi, which has been in office since February 2021.Giorgia Meloni's post-fascist “Brothers of Italy” party had also rejected the law from the start.
In the Senate, Salvini and Forza Italia Senator Licia Ronzulli introduced an alternative to the "Legge Zan". The parties of the left, however, opposed a debate on the counter-draft of the right-wing parties, while the right remained in its present form in its rejection of the law. Senate President Elisabetta Casellati from Berlusconi's Forza Italia therefore started the secret vote on the law in its present form.
In June, the Vatican also sent a verbal note to the Italian government against the bill. In the note of Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the foreign representative of the Holy See, the bill was described as an attack on the "freedom of the Catholic Church guaranteed in the 1984 Concordat between Italy and the Holy See". The bilateral treaty guarantees the Catholic Church the free exercise of faith, teaching and the office of bishop. In the note verbal, the Vatican expressed the fear that on the national “Day against Homophobia and Transphobia” planned by the “Legge Zan” on May 17th, Catholic educational institutions could also be obliged to hold events “to combat discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity “To hold.
As the Italian Bishops' Conference had previously confirmed, the Vatican also expressed its conviction that no further law against homophobia and transphobia was needed, because the offenses named therein are already punishable under the current legal situation. Instead, there is a risk that the new law will promote intolerance. In the future, even expressing the view that a child needs a father and a mother instead of two same-sex parents or that adoptions should only be allowed for heterosexual couples could be punished as hate speech.
This line of argument of the church was also shared by the three right-wing parties, who now jointly brought the law down - although two of them belong to the coalition and only the “brothers of Italy” are in opposition. For Prime Minister Draghi, the rejection of the "Legge Zan" means a further burden on his broad coalition, which threatens to be paralyzed by the dispute between the parties of the right and the left.
In the secret vote in the Senate, several senators from the small center-left “Italia Viva” party of the former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi also voted against the “Legge Zan”.
Renzi's party is also part of Prime Minister Draghi's coalition.
Renzi only made the takeover of the former ECB President Draghi possible in February when he left the left-wing coalition under Draghi's predecessor Conte.
In recent weeks, Renzi has tried to bring his small party closer to the center-right alliance of Forza Italia, Lega and “Brothers Italy”.