November 11, 2016 The Liguria Regional Council has approved a motion urging the Regional Council to establish a one-stop service for families. The document states that the service will "provide a pro-family listening and information tool, defending families' educational freedom and curbing the phenomenon of ideological indoctrination known as 'gender ideology.'" The Arcigay Committees of Liguria (Genoa, Savona, and Imperia) express their "utmost disappointment at an act that intends to fuel a fight against a phantom phenomenon, that is, something that does not exist. "Anti-gender" propaganda has no victims or executioners; it is a strategy that has the sole purpose of denigrating the daily work of associations that bring the fight against bullying and discrimination into schools. It is unacceptable that the Liguria Region spends public resources not to meet the needs of people and the many emergencies, but rather to comply with the consensus strategy of the right and those who build political careers on these phantoms. Speaking of needs and emergencies, we recall that in 2009 the Region approved an important law promoting the fight against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. We would like to emphasize that that very Law (No. 52/2009) provides funding for training against discrimination: that money has not yet been used for concrete activities. It is to be hoped that the institution should implement what is law, and therefore is demanded by the community, rather than placing itself at the service of propaganda".
“"It's incredible," continues Gabriele Piazzoni, national secretary of Arcigay, "that in times of great financial difficulty for local authorities and real emergencies awaiting responses from institutions, some political forces, today in Liguria and months ago in Lombardy, decide to commit the institutions' efforts to a doubly despicable operation: anti-gay propaganda is like those snake oil salesmen who, in order to sell their fraudulent remedies, must first convince their victims that they have the problem to which the remedy supposedly provides a solution. This is a blatant deception, which, in addition to instilling fear in people, consumes the time and resources of public institutions, to the detriment of the real problems. There is a massive emergency in schools: it's called bullying, and it has been documented by numerous highly authoritative studies around the world for decades. Its victims are LGBTI people and those perceived as such, but also boys and girls from other parts of the world, the overweight, the disabled, and even those who can't afford a designer sweatshirt. Bullying is a daily phenomenon." "In schools, and the tools put in place to combat it are insufficient and largely supported by voluntary organizations. Those who today try to tell us that the alarm in schools is about educational freedom or even indoctrination are turning a reality on its head, and they do so at the expense of the boys and girls who are victims of that reality and of bullies every day," concludes Piazzoni.
