Posted on 01/14/2006 12:42:14 PM PST by SmithL
ROME -- Tens of thousands of women marched through Milan on Saturday to demand Italy keep its liberal abortion law intact while gays rallied in Rome to push for legal recognition for homosexual couples.
Both topics have become issues in Italy's election campaign, and the Roman Catholic Church and ministers in Premier Silvio Berlusconi's conservative government were scathing in denouncing the rallies.
"These demonstrators are really nauseating," Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli, a member of the right-wing Northern League, was quoted as saying by the Italian news agency ANSA. "Family is a serious thing, based on love between a man and a woman."
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, because without children, Italy dies," Buttiglione said.
The 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 gay rally in Piazza Farnese 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Just ask San Francisco.
San Francisco thrives because it has a whole country to recruit from.
Based on what I read in that article (granted, it's the Onion, but the grain of truth is what makes it funny as hell), I wouldn't worry about those rallies changing anyone's minds.
"These demonstrators are really nauseating," Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli, a member of the right-wing Northern League,
couldn't of said it better myself.
Amazing. Their birthrate is down the toilet. They're being mutated into the Caliphate of Italy. Their culture will be history - and still they want to continue their national suicide at breakneck speed. When did Romans turn into Italians?
This will affect families in Italy if these measures go through, just as it has affected families in Holland.
http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200406030910.asp
"The "conservative case" for gay marriage appears just plain wrong. In Scandinavia and in the Netherlands, marriage has substantially weakened in the years since registered partnerships and formal gay marriage have been debated and enacted."
"In the past seven years, however, the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate has been moving up at the strikingly high rate of two-percentage points per year. It needs to be emphasized that it is comparatively rare (although not unheard of) for a Western country's out-of-wedlock birthrate to sustain a 2-percentage-point-per-year increase for seven consecutive years. Every year the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate continues to rise at a two-percent rate is a surprise. "
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