Standing Sentinels, ‘Gender Conspiracies’ and Surrogate Mothers: The Recent Italian Debate on LGBT Issues

LGBT issues, and particularly marriage equality, have been for a long time a taboo in predominantly Catholic Italy. Particularly, the opposition of the Vatican and the presence of Catholic parties and factions in centre-left coalitions, have so far prevented the approval not only of a law legally recognizing same-sex partnerships, but even a law punishing homophobic crimes. This did not hinder the development of a lively debate on LGBT issues before and after the 2006 and 2013 elections, which has already been described in previous works (Ozzano 2015; Ozzano and Giorgi 2016). This paper will instead specifically focus on the most recent debate on the issue developed as a consequence of the education policies of the Renzi government, and its attempt to pass a law legalizing Civil Unions (the Cirinnà draft bill), in a context marked by the Europeanization of the issue (with a July 2015 ECHR sentence punishing Italy for not granting enough protection to same-sex couples), as well as the development of a wide grassroots Catholic mobilization, targeted against the so-called ‘gender ideology’. The paper will take into account this recent wave of debate (2014-6), and compare it to the previous ones, by analyzing a database of newspaper articles through a text-driven coding scheme. The paper’s aim is to find out the frames and the argumentations proposed by the main political and social actors involved in the new phase of the debate, and their interplay; and, more broadly, to define the perspectives for marriage equality in Italy in the near future.