The choice of Anna Paola Concia, LGBT activist and former deputy of the Democratic Party, for the ‘Educating in relationships’ project promoted by the Ministry of Education and Merit, caused surprise and resistance even among the center-right majority and among organizations that promote a vision family tradition.
Yet the choice of minister Giuseppe Valditara to appoint three different women but ready to collaborate such as Sister Anna Monia Alfieri, Paola Zerman and Concia herself, began with a common declaration of good will from the three chosen ones.
“We have agreed to put ourselves at the service of a balanced, serious and useful project for girls and boys, based on dialogue. Starting with the three of us, three very different women”, they told ANSA. But a heavy distancing is arrived from Forza Italia: “I wouldn’t have done it. Anna Paola Concia is a very good person, but I don’t see why she should be in charge of this project. I don’t agree with my Northern League friend Valditara on this”, commented Maddalena Morgante, national manager of the Family and Non-negotiable Values department of Forza Italia.
While the Pro Vita e Famiglia association immediately announced, with its spokesperson Jacopo Coghe, “a popular petition addressed to the Minister of Education Giuseppe Valditara, nominated at the Lega level, which in just a few hours has already collected thousands of signatures from dismayed voters” .
«We will carry on this battle without giving in to any compromise, ready to draw conclusions – warns Coghe – at the next European elections». Carlo Giovanardi also complains that between an LGBT activist married to another woman, a nun and a state lawyer “the “great absence in the project” is “precisely the family, that natural society founded on marriage, between man and woman, engraved in article 29 of the Constitution”.
The criticism of the head of freedom and rights of the Italian Left, Marilena Grassadonia, is of an opposite nature, criticizing the choice of a religious woman. “I quietly remind Valditara that Italy is a secular country and that calling a nun to manage relationship education in schools is quite jarring.”