Trudeau is wrong to compare Italy to Hungary on the subject of LGBT rights. Aurelio Mancuso writes to us

We publish the intervention of Aurelius Mancusoformer PCI militant, then national leader of the DS and finally of the Democratic Party and president of Arcigay from 2007 to 2010

The attack by the premier of Canada, Justin Trudeau to the Italian government, due to the methods and context in which it took place, is sensational and absolutely negative, not for the Prime Minister, but for Italy. The current right-wing government is not a friend of the experiences and aspirations of LGBT people, it has no intention of proposing reforms that increase civil or even social rights; many of its exponents are openly averse to promoting active instruments of protection. The parties that make up the majority of the executive, with various intensities, not only do not have initiatives to support equal LGBT citizenship in their programs, but some of them, locally and nationally, distinguish themselves in propagating homonegative, and even homosexual, transphobic sentiments.

Having said all this, compare the Italian government to that of Hungary and other countries, where openly discriminatory laws have been approved (as contained in a recent Resolution of the European Parliament), it is a huge mistake, which among other things does not help the battles of inclusion carried out by movements not only LGBT. What is most striking and makes these attacks by European institutions and Western states specious is that they do not criticize the enormous Italian delays with respect to full equality of access to marriage, to adoptions, to the revision of the legislation on the recognition of the reassignment of gender, but the focus is on the subject of the transcripts of the intending parents in the birth certificates of children born from assisted fertilization or surrogacy. On the subject, the Constitutional Court and the Cassation have pronounced themselves clearly, also distinguishing in the cases. The automatic transcription at the birth of non-biological parents (always prohibited even for heterosexual couples), violates the current law, and can be resolved through the appeal of the institution of special adoption. Are these routes exhausting and expensive? We intervene with more adequate legislation, which must always have the rights of the minor at the center and not the requests of adults.

Trudeau’s attack rather than that of the European Parliament is an undue interference in the internal affairs of a democratic country, fully belonging to international institutions, although sovereign in these matters, as established by the EU Treaties. If you want to help Italian LGBT people gain new rights, support them (as administrations in the United States and other countries have done in the past) with campaigns, concrete aid, gestures of closeness. Until proven otherwise, despite the need for example for rules against discrimination and violence (whose process failed certainly not because of the Italian right), Italy is not Iran or Hungary, and this is due to the fact that decades of struggles of sexual liberation movements have led to a social and cultural adhesion of the Italian people, with respect to the equality and specificity of the LGBT people who act in our country.