The Anti-LGBTQ+ Views of Italy's Likely New Leader, Giorgia Meloni
LGBTQ+ Italians are concerned about the views of the country’s presumptive new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.Meloni is leader of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), a right-wing party that is forming a coalition government with two other conservative parties, League and Forza Italia, that appear to have won a majority of seats in Italy’s Parliament.
Voting results will likely be final by Monday.If all goes as expected, she will be the nation’s first woman leader and head its most conservative government since World War II.
However, she has “played down her party’s post-fascist roots and portrays it as a mainstream group like Britain’s Conservatives,” according to Openly, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s LGBTQ+ news site.But there’s no getting away from the anti-LGBTQ+ statements she has made on many occasions and those made by her colleagues in Fratelli d’Italia.“Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death,” she said in June while speaking to members of a far-right party in Spain.She opposes allowing same-sex couples to have children through adoption or surrogacy.
When an LGBTQ+ activist queried her on Facebook about the issue, she replied, “I believe a child has the right to grow up with a father and a mother.”Other members of her party have spoken out against LGBTQ+ rights as well.
