Bologna, October 1, 2013 – "In Rome, a young man was beaten bloody at a metro stop by a shaved head simply because he was gay; in Milan, a disabled homosexual was harassed, beaten, insulted, and robbed for months by a gang, now no longer at liberty, who forced him to live in confinement at home. There is a very high level of violence in our country today, but politicians refuse to investigate its origins." This is the complaint of Arcigay president Flavio Romani, commenting on two incidents of homophobic violence reported in the press in recent days. "On hate crimes," Romani continues, "we receive only blunt weapons from politics, a debate (even before legislation) that legitimizes more than it actually punishes. There is too much ambiguity in the discourse on discrimination, too much opportunism, too much desire to justify such conduct as the exercise of freedom. It's not enough to sanction violence after the fact," the president of Arcigay attacks, "if on the other hand we preserve the environments in which that violence is cultivated, safe not only from the law but even from public debate. No sanction, however severe, can act as a deterrent if the violent perpetrators' presumption of being right has not been culturally eroded. Those who fail to address the root of the problem today," Romani concludes, "are protecting that violence.".
