“"We believe that good politics is that which adds and guarantees rights and promotes civil coexistence; on the contrary, bad politics is that which builds its own development on injustice, civil conflict, and the denial of rights," declared Luigi Carollo, spokesperson for the Palermo Pride Coordination Committee, Enzo Cucco, coordinator of the ILGA Turin 2011 Committee, and Paolo Patanè, national president of Arcigay.
The launch of a popular petition by the Palermo PDL leadership against any form of recognition of the rights of de facto couples, especially same-sex couples, not only demonstrates a bad political practice, but also debases and offends the democratic instrument of the popular petition by using it for exclusively electoral purposes and not for the common good.
This petition not only alienates Palermo and Sicily from the Italian context, where Constitutional Court ruling no. 138 of 2010 definitively clarified that LGBT families are constitutionally protected, but also from the European context, which, from Turin, where the 15th annual conference of Ilga-europe is taking place, continues to be astonished by the obtuseness of an Italian political class that remains deaf, blind, and mute to the LGBT reality of our country.
We, the representatives of Italian and European LGBT associations, believe that the duty of politicians should be to provide serious responses to the demands of the LGBT community, both in terms of individual rights and the recognition of couples, through concrete legislative interventions. We fear that folkloristic and certainly captivating initiatives, such as the petition, may perhaps be useful for wagering an electoral campaign at the expense of homosexual and transgender people, but at the same time expose a sad and total lack of understanding on the part of this right. .
Luigi Carollo, spokesperson for the Palermo Pride Coordination
Enzo Cucco, coordinator of the ILGA Committee Turin 2011
Paolo Patanè National President of Arcigay
