Far right in Italy and Spain target rainbow families and flags

Italy is debating a crackdown on surrogate parents, seen as an attack on LGBTI families, while Spain’s far-right party goes after the rainbow flag.

Italian MPs are debating a law that would make it illegal for Italian citizens to engage a surrogate mother in another country, with prison terms of up to three years and fines of up to €1m.

A 2004 law already banned surrogacy in Italy.

The new surrogacy regime is backed by prime minister Georgia Meloni and adds to fears in Italy’s LGBTI community that her far-right government will erode their civil rights.

The proposed ban would also apply to opposite-sex couples, but critics see that as camouflage for its real intention — to stop homosexual couples raising children.

The surrogacy bill comes in a wider context of curbs on non-biological parents, which have already hurt many ‘rainbow families’.

A top court in Italy ruled last year that non-biological parents cannot automatically be listed on children’s birth records, and need to go through the long legal process of adoption in order to be formally recognised.

Some mayors did add non-biological parents when processing birth certificates from abroad, in defiance of the ruling.

And Italian opposition MP Chiara Appendino, who did so when serving as mayor of Turin, warned that the harsh consequences of the new surrogacy law “will be paid by the children”, AP reported.

The prosecutors’ office in the Italian city of Padua this week also demanded that non-biological parents be removed from the birth certificates of 33 children registered to lesbian couples since 2017.

The children can no longer even use their non-biological parent’s surname.

“The Italian decision is monstrous, because it simply amounts to the administrative removal of a child from one of its parents on the grounds of homosexuality,” French liberal MEP Pierre Karleskind said earlier this week.

“We cannot let children be the victims of this despicable far-right crusade against rainbow families,” he said.

‘Deserves the best’

Meloni was raised by a single mother and is herself an unmarried parent.

But she wants to be seen as a defender of Christian values against what she calls “gender ideology” and the “LGBTI lobby”.

“A child deserves only the best: a mother and a father,” she said in March.

But if her anti-LGBTI rhetoric is meant to be populist, that kind of discourse appears to be less and less popular with Italian public opinion.

An Ipsos poll last June showed that 63 percent of Italians backed marriage rights for gay people — up 15 points from 2013.

It also said 59 percent were in favour of gay adoptions — an increase of 17 points from nine years ago, Reuters reported.

The EU has not passed any laws specifically on the rights of rainbow families, as it has no competence in family law in general.

But EU jurisprudence and the political mood in the EU capital also go against Meloni-type anti-rainbow attacks.

“Family law is a national competence,” said EU Commission spokesman Christian Wiegand.

But he also said: “Our position on parental rights in cross-border cases is that if one is a parent in one member state and is recognised as such in one member state, other member states must recognise that parenthood”.

In a landmark ruling, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said in December 2021 that same-sex parents and their children should be recognised as a family in all EU member states.

More: https://euobserver.com/rule-of-law/157172

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