world congress families
End-of-conference pro-life march at the World Congress of Families event in Verona, Italy, at the end of March 2019
Several tens of thousands of people have marched in support of the ultra-conservative World Congress of Families on Sunday, on the final day of their conference in northern Italy.


Comment: Not ultra-conservative, just conservative - predominantly Christian, though not exclusively.

Which, relative to the actual ultras on the liberal-left, is still fairly liberal.


Participants in the city of Verona carried pink and blue balloons and placards with slogans such as "Yes to life, not to abortion", an AFP correspondent saw.

Supporters travelled by train and coach from all over Italy to attend the march, which came a day after protesters staged their own demonstration denouncing the organisation's anti-abortion, anti-gay stance.

Before the march started at around midday, those gathered listened to a message from the organisers of the Congress. "The family, fundamental pillar of our society, must be at the centre of government policies," they said in their closing statement.

world congress families
wcfverona.org
Some marchers carried tiny rubber models that were handed out during the conference, which were intended to represent a 10-week old foetus. They came with the message: "Abortion stops a beating heart."

The three-day conference attracted senior political figures from the far-right including Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini and two other government ministers.


Comment: ...and foreign leaders, and foreign ministers, and Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox church leaders, and academics, and journalists, and royals, and religious charity leaders...

Speakers

Needless to say, Salvini was the star of the show:



Don't touch abortion law: Salvini

The event also revealed divisions in the ruling coalition of Salvini's League party and the anti-Establishment Five Star Movement. But Salvini's coalition partner Luigi Di Maio, leader of the Five Star Movement, denounced the World Congress of Families as a gathering of "fanatics".

"The vision defended by this Congress in Verona is a vision of the world that belongs for the most part to the Middle Ages, which considers women as submissive," said De Maio.


Comment: His ultra-liberal stance is starting to hurt him in the polls: Salvini's party trounced Di Maio's in regional elections in southern 'swing' regions in February. Remember, before Salvini, La Lega was until a northern separatist party!


Salvini, while backing the Congress's vision of a family as one composed of "a father and a mother", rejected calls by some participants to abolish Italy's laws. "You don't touch the 194 law," said Salvini, referring to the 1978 legislation that legalised abortion. "There's no debate either on abortion, or on marriage. Everyone makes love with whoever they want, and dines with whoever they want," he added.


Comment: See? Hardly 'ultra-conservative'.

This article, by the way, was the least fanatically biased media report we found on this major international event (which was only mentioned by some international media to cast it as Hitlerian).


Italy legalised civil unions between people of the same sex in 2016. Salvini has however spoken out against gay couples being allowed to adopt.

Founded in 1997 by the American Brian Brown, the World Congress of Families has held an annual meeting since 2012. Its credo, as stated on its website, is to "affirm, celebrate, and defend the natural family as the only fundamental and sustainable unit of society".


Comment: The best thing to come out of the US in decades.


Previous meetings include one in Hungary, which enjoyed the patronage of the country's far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban. As well as Salvini, other speakers at this year's event include the President of Moldova Igor Dodon -- a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.


Comment: Oooh, proximity to Putin!


Hungary's ultra-conservative Families Minister Katalin Novak and a senior figure in the Russian Orthodox Church, Dmitri Smirnov, were also listed as speakers. And two other Italian ministers were listed as speakers at the Congress: Lorenzo Fontana, Minister for Families and Disabilities and Education Minister Marco Busetti.