|
ROME (AP) | Jan 16, 2:14
PM
GAY NEWS:: Tens of thousands of women marched through
Milan to keep Italy's liberal abortion law intact
while gays rallied in Rome to push for legal
recognition for gay couples as both issues heated
up in the campaign for the premiership.
|
| |
 |
|
|
A gay couple embrace
during a gay march through Rome Saturday. The
Vatican and ministers in Premier Silvio
Berlusconi's conservative government were
scathing in denouncing the rally. (AP
photo/Andrew Medichini) |
| The Vatican and
ministers in Premier Silvio Berlusconi's
conservative government were scathing in
denouncing Saturday's rallies.
"These
demonstrators are really nauseating," Reforms
Minister Roberto Calderoli was quoted as saying by
the Italian news agency ANSA. "Family is a serious
thing, based on love between a man and a woman."
He is a member of the right-wing Northern League
party.
Culture Minister Rocco Buttiglione,
who is close to the Vatican, told reporters that
people's energy should be spent on pro-family
efforts like finding jobs and
housing.
"These are the political problems
you should put the spotlight on," Buttiglione
said. "Because without children, Italy
dies."
Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore
Romano denounced as "provocations" efforts to give
legal recognition to unmarried couples
"independent of whether the partners are of
different or the same sex." A program on Vatican
Radio described the rally in Piazza Farnese, one
of historic Rome's loveliest squares, as
"ideological sexuality."
A crowd of gays
and their supporters filled the Rome square to
lobby for legal recognition for both gay and
unmarried heterosexual couples. "Let's free love
from religious phobia," read one banner in the
crowd, estimated by police to number about
1,000.
Piazza Farnese, where the French
Embassy has its home in a Renaissance palace, was
chosen for the Rome rally because in 2002 two
Italian men registered their union at the French
Consulate under a French law giving broad legal
rights to gay couples. One of the two men also had
French citizenship.
The Milan
demonstration, whose slogan was "Let's emerge from
silence," was organized by women concerned that
Catholic politicians, encouraged by the Vatican,
would try to undo a 1978 law which makes abortion
legal in the first three months of
pregnancy.
Milan police estimated that some
50,000 people joined in the march, which ended in
the square in front of the Duomo, the city's
Gothic cathedral.
Pope Benedict XVI on
Thursday said it was wrong to give legal
recognition to gay unions and also reaffirmed the
Vatican's condemnation of abortion.
Italian
bishops have made abortion a campaign issue for
the first time since 1981, when Italians upheld
the law in a referendum backed by the Vatican in a
bid to overturn the 1978
legislation.
Politicians in the center-left
opposition challenging Berlusconi in April 9
voting have been divided over how far to go in
granting rights to gay people who live
together.
The question is a delicate one
for Romano Prodi, a center-left Catholic who is
Berlusconi's opponent in the election.
 |
