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In December 2006, the Italian Senate issued a policy directive calling for the establishment of civil unions for de facto couples, gay and straight, and ordering the creation of draft legislation outlining a registered partnership scheme by January 31st, 2007.

But by early February, the resulting bill was steeping in a witch's brew of acrimonious controversy. Fissures were appearing in Prime Minister Romano Prodi's center-left l'Unione (Union) government, and starting to turn into yawning gaps.

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The proposed Patto Civile di Solidarietą (PACS), a "Civil Solidarity Pact" similar to the pacte civile introduced in France in 1999, would enable two unwed partners to obtain official certification as a couple, regardless of sex or sexual orientation. Legally recognized domestic partners would enjoy many of the same rights as legally married couples, gaining access to joint health insurance, property rights, public housing eligibility, inheritance rights, visitation rights at hospitals and prisons, and next-of-kin decision-making powers in medical emergencies.

The Union coalition, which nudged the conservative Forza Italia out of power in April 2006, had pledged in its election platform to implement PACS legislation. The Union is a nine-party alliance encompassing Democratici di Sinistra (Democrats of the Left), the liberal Margherita (Daisy) party, Greens, communists, socialists, pensioners, and the Italian Radicals.

Some observers fear the Union could dissolve in the heat of debate. Its members hold varied opinions on recognition of conjugal relationships outside traditional marriage. Some, including the Party of Italian Communists, have lobbied for gay marriage; others oppose even watered-down PACS legislation. Prime Minister Prodi is willing to support Civil Solidarity Pacts, though he balks at extending full marital rights to gay couples.

Justice Minister Clemente Mastella, on the other hand, wants no part of any plan legitimizing unmarried couples, especially those of the same sex. A devout Catholic who heads the centrist Popular-UDEUR party, Mastella would be obliged to enforce whatever PACS law Parliament enacts, a position he finds untenable. Before the PACS bill can be sent to Italy's bicameral Parliament, Mastella and his fellow cabinet ministers must put it to a vote.

"I don't care if the government falls, but I am not going to vote for that law," Mastella told the press in late January. "Homosexuals can acquire more rights, but I'll never accept the idea that they can be considered a family."

Some regions of Italy have already passed local ordinances echoing PACS arrangements. In July 2004, the first Italian civil-union statute was introduced in Tuscany. Umbria soon followed. By the end of that year, similar laws had gone into effect in Emilia-Romagna, Campania, and Marche. By the end of 2006, a handful of other regions and municipalities had instituted their own systems of domestic partnership. In December, the city of Padua gave unmarried couples the right to register as "families based on ties of affection." Without national legislation, however, such laws remain substantially symbolic.

Blackshirts and collars

Secular condemnation of PACS has been led by the center-right juggernaut Forza Italia. High-profile foes of civil partnerships include Forza Italia's founder, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose family-values rhetoric recently wilted in the light of his wife's much-publicized complaints about his extramarital interests, and politician Alessandra Mussolini, who honors the traditions of her late grandfather, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

But the most forceful opposition has come from the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Benedict XVI has been waging a relentless campaign against recognition of same-sex unions. Despite the wish for "open and sincere dialogue" he expressed upon succeeding Pope John Paul II (see The Guide, July 2005), the pontiff has made every effort to shut down discussion of gay issues-- continuing, in effect, the program of censorship and doctrinal enforcement he conducted as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Inquisition). Expanding on the Church's 1975 description of homosexual acts as "intrinsically disordered," Ratzinger stressed that "the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder."

The Ratzinger vision of homosexuality is now being promoted with evangelical zeal. At the Vatican's Lateran University, the John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and the Family recently sponsored a five-day strategy session on how to stop the proliferation of laws recognizing same-sex unions in Italy and around the world. Same-sex couples are "at odds with basic anthropological facts" said Cardinal Camilio Ruini at a recent conference of Italian bishops.

"Plans to give legal recognition to other forms of union [besides heterosexual marriage]," Pope Benedict recently told Rome's secular leadership, "...appear dangerous and counterproductive, as they will inevitably weaken and destabilize the legitimate family based on matrimony."

Such attitudes run deep in the country where Roman Catholicism evolved and continues to wield power from within the Vatican, its independent city-state. For many Italians, the most important subtext of the PACS debate is the question of how much power the Vatican should have. The primary reason why Italy remains the Western European nation least responsive to gay rights is that the Church is inextricably blended into Italian culture. (This fact did not prevent Italian voters from defying the Vatican by approving divorce in a 1974 referendum, however, nor does it faze Italian feminists seeking legalized abortion.)

Church influence is felt in the national constitution, which makes a point of defining the family as "founded on marriage." Right-wing claims that PACS legislation is unconstitutional are based in part on parliamentary attempts to make the official definition of the family more inclusive, and in part on simple resistance to considering constitutional protections for LGBT individuals. Under Article 3 of the Italian constitution, "all citizens have equal social status" whatever their race, sex, or religion. Attempts to add sexual orientation to that list have provoked oppositional rage.

No national Italian law has yet been passed forbidding discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation-- although, surprisingly, no law exists proscribing homosexual acts. When Tuscany passed a groundbreaking anti-discrimination measure in 2004, the Berlusconi regime immediately mounted a legal challenge. In the end, the national Constitutional Court overturned only the portion of the Tuscan ordinance pertaining to accommodations, leaving provisions insuring equality in education, public services, and employment intact. That legal milestone gave activists a foundation in which to build similar laws nationwide.

The sometimes turbulent history of the Italian struggle for gay rights has balanced sober uses of mainstream political means with public gestures ranging from horrific to droll. On January 13th, 1998, 40-year-old poet/activist Alfredo Ormando doused himself with gasoline in St. Peter's Square, and set himself fatally ablaze to protest the Church's position on homosexuality. This year, on the ninth anniversary of Ormando's self-immolation, members of Arcigay, the principal Italian gay rights organization, held a pro-PACS demonstration at the site.

Other protests have relied on impudent humor. In 2004, after Dario Mattiello, assistant to the vice president of the Italian Senate, was sacked because of a documented visit to a Roman gay club, pranksters saturated the Senate's computer system with hard-core gay porn. Last December, Bruno Mellano and Donatella Poretti, parliamentary representatives of Rosa nel Pugno-- the Rose in the Fist, a federation of the Democratic Socialist and Radical parties-- shocked conservatives and alienated some allies by placing dolls representing male and female same-sex couples in the Italian Parliament's Christmas creche.

As debate thunders in and out of Parliament, a more effective source of pro-PACS leverage may be the anti-discrimination policies of the European Union, which counts Italy among its founding members. Noting that other EU countries, including Catholic Spain, now recognize gay partnerships, Italy's EU Affairs Minister Emma Bonino warned in a January radio interview that failure to make PACS the law of the land could mean disciplinary action by the supranational body.

Franco Grillo, one of five LGBT candidates elected to the Italian Parliament last year, has publicly stated that the demise of PACS legislation will create "an earthquake in Italian politics"-- a tremor that could bring down Prodi's government, and throw l'Unione into terminal disunity.