The Recent Italian Political Debate about the Legalization of Same-Sex Unions, and the Approval of the Cirinnà Bill

In 2016, Italy was the last EU country to approve a law regulating same-sex partnerships. This was not surprising for many, since LGBT issues, and particularly marriage equality, had 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 for a long time 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 recent debate about the new law legalizing Civil Unions (often referred to as 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 traditionalist Catholic mobilization, targeted against the so-called ‘gender ideology’. The Paper will take into account specifically this new wave of debate, reconstructing its different phases, and comparing it to the previous ones, by analyzing a database of about 900 newspaper articles through a text-driven coding scheme. Particular attention will be paid to the phases of the political process leading to the approval of the law, and to a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the frames proposed by the main political and social actors involved.