Italy’s outgoing government has adopted a new LGBT+ strategy. The move comes days before handing over the reins to a right-wing administration.
The 30-page “National LGBT+ Strategy 2022-2025,” formally approved on October 6th, aims to fight discrimination in schools, universities, hospitals, prisons, sport clubs, and the workplace in general.
“We weren’t very ideological, we were very concrete,” Equal Opportunities Minister Elena Bonetti told Reuters. She said the contents of the document were not controversial.
However, Giorgia Meloni of Brothers of Italy (Fdl) and her right-wing coalition won the majority of the vote in the September 25 election with pledges to defend the “traditional family” and resist “LGBT lobbies”.
What’s in the LGBT+ strategy?
The strategy recommends measures including LGBT-awareness courses for teachers, doctors, police officers and prison guards. It also calls for the monitoring of homophobic language in the media. It also adds specific anti-LGBT discrimination clauses in national labour agreements.
Isabella Rauti, Brothers of Italy’s spokeswoman for equal opportunities, family affairs and “non-negotiable values”, said it was wrong for a caretaker government on the way out to commit its successor to a multi-year roadmap.
“I won’t comment on any of the merits, but for me it is the principle,” she told Reuters.
Bonetti, a centrist from ex-premier Matteo Renzi’s Italia Viva party acknowledged whoever succeeds her in office could follow a different path. “I hope the next government will implement what we have laid out,” she said.
It was October last year that the Senate rejected the so called ‘Zan Law’ which aimed to make violence against LGBT+ people and disabled people, as well as misogyny, a hate crime.
What will Meloni do regarding LGBT rights?
Meloni has ruled out rolling back existing laws on LGBT rights and abortion, but has also excluded extending them. Her party is particularly hostile to same-sex parenting and “gender fluid” ideas.
Only last month, Brother of Italy’s culture spokesman, Federico Mollicone, attacked the popular children’s cartoon “Peppa Pig” for showing a polar bear with two lesbian mothers in one of its episodes. He denounced it as “gender indoctrination.”
