Italian Minister of Constitutional Reforms and Relations with Parliament, Maria Elena Boschi, top right, greets Senator Monica Cirinna’ during a confidence vote in the Italian Senate, in Rome, Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016.
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Prime Minister Matteo Renzi put his government on the line for the bill, resorting to a confidence vote on Thursday in the Senate to push through the amended text.
The bill now needs to go before a vote in the lower house, where Renzi has a more comfortable majority, and should in theory be fully approved within two months.
Italy’s Senate on Thursday approved a landmark bill recognising same-sex civil unions but only after removing a provision that would have allowed gay adoption, much to the disappointment of gay rights activists.
The legislation, spurred on after the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy for discriminating against gays, is nevertheless significant for an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country where the Vatican holds sway.
The law grants same-sex couples numerous same rights as married couples: the possibility of having the same last name, inheritance rights, hospital visitation rights and decision-making rights about medical care.
A group of Italian Senators have presented a bill to remove a section in the civil code referring to the obligation for spouses to be faithful to one another – after conservative Catholics forced a similar removal from a new watered-down version of a bill on civil unions including gay ones.
The rights granted by the bill fall far short of the marriage status allowed for same-sex couples in the United States, Britain and many other countries.
“We are outraged, angry, disappointed”, said Marilena Grassadonia, president of Rainbow Families, the Italian association of homosexual parents.
“The accord on civil unions is a historic event for Italy”, Renzi wrote on Twitter Wednesday. Furthermore, she said the agreement political parties have reached on civil unions recognised “a more advanced model” of conjugal relations that needed to be acknowledged in the civil code.
Democrats have promised that the question of whether homosexuals can adopt the biological children of their partners would be taken up in a separate overhaul of Italy’s adoption laws.
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“We prevented an anthropological revolution against nature”, interior minister Angelino Alfano (photo) bragged.
