A game stab by the Italians at capturing the beautifulness of Australia’s “It’s time” campaign from late last year. It’s not quite as good – the point isn’t quite as clear, there’s no ‘shock’ reveal, the direction is a bit… basic, but it’s still a lovely thing.
The reason for this video existing is because the human rights bodies of Europe haven’t got round to tackling something ridiculous on our continent – that you can move from one country to another and see your rights and the fundamentals of your life change as you cross borders.
When the ball-and-chain and I go on holiday (by train) in the EU, we’re in the odd position of having our status change while we sit quietly reading in the carriage. In the UK, we’re ‘civil partners’, one stop short of married, we can’t be discriminated against legally and we can adopt children (perhaps not while sitting on a train). We pop out of the Channel Tunnel into France, where we are in a ‘civil solidarity’ contract, can’t be discriminated against legally but can’t adopt children.
If we head north in Belgium or the Netherlands, we’re suddenly married and have full equality before the law. If, however, we head south to Italy, when we cross the border we stop being even civil partners and become two individuals with no rights or links to each other at all. If you’re straight and married, you’ve never faced this – you leave one country as a married couple and arrive in the next as a married couple. On one (albeit impossibly circuitous) journey, I can go from being in a civil partnership to being married to being single without leaving my seat and without even exchanging a glance with my life partner.
This clearly needs to change – if only because the next generation don’t want to be put through such nonsense and don’t need to be; young straight people don’t want their gay friends putting up with such absurdities either. This is the opening shot in a campaign to end discrimination in a country once in the forefront – Italy legalised homosexuality in 1890, 77 years before England and Wales managed it. It’s a shame they’ve now fallen so very far behind.
Another damn blog 