"Il Papa" Blues: What It's Like to Be Gay in Italy

For those who are interested in how the Pope and the Catholic church influence gay rights' legislation and hinder LGBT organizing in Italy, I highly recommend a film made some new friends of mine from Italy: Suddenly Last Winter (L'improvvisamente l'anno scorso).



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Suddenly Last Winter is currently screening in English and Italian (with English subtitles) at film festivals worldwide and gives a sense of the current cultural and political landscape for LGBT people in Italy.

The film by Gustav Hofer and Luca Ragazzi has won numerous awards at film festivals in the last year, including a special mention in the prestigious Berlinale Panorama section.

The Full Text of Pope Benedict XVI's Comments about Gender

For those who are interested, here is a full-text English translation of the Pope's speech.

I am reprinting the passage in which he discusses gender and creationism below:

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Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Credo, the Church cannot and should not confine itself to passing on the message of salvation alone. It has a responsibility for the created order and ought to make this responsibility prevail, even in public. And in so doing, it ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself. What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense. When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term “gender”, results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator. The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition. The great Scholastic theologians have characterised matrimony, the life-long bond between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation, instituted by the Creator himself and which Christ – without modifying the message of creation – has incorporated into the history of his covenant with mankind. This forms part of the message that the Church must recover the witness in favour of the Spirit Creator present in nature in its entirety and in a particular way in the nature of man, created in the image of God. Beginning from this perspective, it would be beneficial to read again the Encyclical Humanae Vitae: the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against sexuality as a consumer entity, the future as opposed to the exclusive pretext of the present, and the nature of man against its manipulation.

The Pope Declares that Humanity Must Be Saved from Gender Theory and Theorists

Does Rick Warren have more influence than the Pope?

While stories of protests from liberals and LGBT groups have been making headlines here, comments today by Pope Benedict XVI (aka Joseph Ratzinger) have been somewhat inconsistently reported in the US media.

In a speech yesterday given to Catholic dignitaries who have gathered in Rome to celebrate Christmas, Ratzinger focused on a theme of reasserting the story of creation as a "central part of the Christian creed." He emphasized two points: God's creation of the earth and man (in particular, man and woman as distinct sexes). He called heterosexual marriage a "sacrament of creation." And Ratzinger followed by arguing for an "ecology of man" to go alongside an ecology of nature/the planet, in which he likened saving the rain forests to "saving man from himself."

And from what does humanity need rescuing? "Theorists who talk about 'gender'."

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25 years or so after feminist scholars popularized an understanding of "gender" (against and/or alongside the notion of "sex"), it seems that Ratzinger has now come to believe that the very concept of "gender" could lead to the self-destruction of the human race. Gender, he argues, separates man from creation and the Creator. While Ratzinger did not explicitly refer to homosexuality or transexuality in the text of his address, he did denounce the blurring of genders and a "sexuality of consumption," arguing definitively that the essence of humanity is "man and woman."

Ratzinger made these proclamations apparently in response to calls from members of the United Nations' Commission on Human Rights for equal rights for gays, France's proposed decriminalization of homosexuality, and increases in legislation favoring same-sex marriage. In his speech, Ratzinger argued that people such as gender theorists, who lack respect for "the Creator and the language of creationism," would destroy God's work. "We must not only defend the earth, water, and air," he pronounced. "We must also protect man from his own self-destruction."

Using the English word "gender" rather than the Italian translation "genere," Ratzinger was clearly singling out the work of Western academics who write on the topics of gender, queer, and trans theory as well as the lives and practices of queer and trans individuals. One could infer, by situating Ratzinger's comments in the context of the story of creation and a pseudo-scientific ecology of nature/man, that he has labeled even the mere concepts of transexuality and homosexuality as crimes against nature and creationism.

This could also be seen as a radical divergence from the church's supposed stance that homosexuality is not sinful, but that homosexual acts are.

While I will admit to feeling some pleasure at indirectly being cited as a threat to humanity--I mean, how often these days are theorists given credit by anyone outside of academia as having any relevance or influence whatsoever?--this is truly sobering and heart-wrenching for the Italian LGBT people and others who live in much more homo-bi-trans-phobic cultures where the Pope's words still have real power.

EDIT: I have included information about an English full-text translation of the Pope's speech here.

New Direction for the Labor Department: Hilda Solis

In a move in line with his campaign pledges to back the Employee Free Choice Act and support the rights of workers, President-elect Barack Obama named California Rep. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte) as his nominee for Labor Secretary yesterday.

Solis, who was raised in a union family, is known as an advocate for women and labor (the AFL-CIO rates her voting record in Congress at 100%). If confirmed, Solis will be the most worker-friendly Labor Secretary in decades.

Solis voted in favor of the Employee Free Choice Act (which has passed in the House but is stalled in the Senate), and she has consistently supported measures related to abortion rights, domestic violence prevention, and worker protections, while rejecting free-trade related legislation.

2009 is shaping up to be a potentially very interesting year for labor.

The UAW, the Auto Bailout, and the Employee Free Choice Act

The most frustrating thing about the endless reporting on the auto industry bailout has been the union bashing. In the congressional hearings that considered providing the Big 3 "bridge loans," congress members, news outlets, and critics of the bailout all seemed to agree that the problem with the US auto industry is really the UAW its negotiated wage and benefits contracts, not poor management or the failure to make cars that people actually want to buy.

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According to Martin Feldstein at the Washington Post, for example:

General Motors, Ford and Chrysler can make excellent cars, but they cannot sell them at prices that are competitive with the prices of cars produced in the United States by Toyota and others or with the prices of cars imported from Europe and Asia. The basic reason is the labor costs imposed by union contracts.

Almost as if these contracts hadn't been negotiated with and agreed to by the management of the Big 3, critics such as Feldstein put almost sole responsibility for the collapse of the US auto industry on the "high" cost of labor. Ignoring issues such as the US auto companies reliance on producing expensive, gas-guzzling SUVs, we are seemingly meant to believe that $72/hour wages and relative labor costs of more than $2000 per car as compared with manufacturers such as Honda and Toyota brought about the downfall of Detroit, with management powerless to do anything about it.

Senate Republicans used such arguments to block bailout legislation unless the UAW immediately acquiesced to stringent demands for wage and benefits decreases. "As far as the failure of last night, it solely lies on UAW," Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) told CNSNews.com regarding the failure of the cloture vote for the bailout legislation on the Senate floor on December 11, 2008.

Obviously trying to strike a death blow to organized labor by going after one of the few remaining union strongholds, Republicans saw this as their opportunity to irreparably damage labor just before the Obama administration comes to power and attempts to pass the Employee Free Choice bill. This piece of legislation will do away with current labor laws that require new unions to obtain a majority registration of workers with the union and have a majority of workers vote to approve the union in a "secret ballot" vote that often takes place months or years after the majority registration has taken place, giving ample time for companies to pressure workers not to approve the union.

Republicans and other anti-union advocates know that if this legislation passes, and Obama has put it on the frunt burner of issues he wants addressed right way, that the removal of the burden of the "secret ballot" will be the biggest boon to organized labor in decades, potentially marking the first uptick in union membership as a percentage of workers since the 1970s.

Republicans see this as a major threat due to labor's consistent backing of Democrats through monetary donations as well as on the ground voter mobilzation. But it is probably Walmart, the biggest union-buster in the US, who has the most to fear.

In the end, however, George W. Bush decided that he didn't want to add the collapse of the auto industry, and the potential loss 2-3 million jobs during the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, to the long list of his presidential failures. So he ordered Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson today to use the TARP funds (which congress set up specifically to rescue the financial industry) to provide just enough loan money to GM and Chrysler for them to survive until Barack Obama is sworn in.