Rome introduces gay marriages
Italy became the last Western European country to adopt a law on same-sex partnerships on Wednesday. A long-overdue move, or a farewell to the institution of marriage?
Gays must be able to adopt
As a concession to opposition critics and members of his own party, Prime Minister Renzi has removed adoption rights from the draft law on gay marriages. But adoption for gays is also long overdue, the right-liberal daily Corriere della Sera admonishes:
“This promise can no longer be put off and must be kept. Otherwise Italy will give the impression it has a blithe and not very convincing policy that first declares its concern for the fate of so many children and then is incapable of working out an adoption law that overcomes the current burdensome, narrow-minded legal framework. ... Must we wait another 30 years? That's the amount of time it took us to finally pass a decent law on civil union.”
Secularisation turns people into a commodity
After the introduction of gay marriage the next steps will be to liberalise the laws on adoption and surrogate motherhood, the Catholic daily Avvenire warns:
“This will be the unavoidable consequence of the process of secularisation that has radically changed - and continues to change - our society. A society based on the institution of marriage that has characterised the Christian West for centuries. ... In other words we find ourselves in a phase in which all manner of attempts are being made to grant new interpersonal, para-family relationships life and coherency, and to overstep limits that unavoidably and decisively obey the rules of the market.”