Italy is currently in a domestic turmoil over same-sex civil unions, debating a bill before parliament. While the Left of course is agressively pushing for approval, on January 30th well over a million people rallied against the legislation, and in support of traditional families.
 
Oddly enough, members of the Italian media can’t count any better than their counterparts in the U.S.. Or maybe it’s just a progressive quirk; math skills regress when it comes to agenda-pushing. In any event, last month’s pro-family rally at Rome’s Circo Massimo was attended by nearly 2 million people ~
 
 

But the leftist media, including the Huffington Post on this side of the Atlantic, couldn’t seem to count any higher than 500,000 ~

The Catholic organizers of Family Day estimated a gathering of 2 million, but that number was quickly shot down by various secular outfits, who claimed such figures were impossible and offered their own calculations — calculations far lower than those estimated by the pro-family group.

 
The Italian press was deliberately trying to downplay the “Family Day” attendance in contrast with rallies held earlier this year by gay activist organization Arcigay, which they claimed drew a million people ~ Italy: Media Bias in Numbers ~

In order to make 1 million participants, the gay activists would have needed approximately 10,000 people to have attended each rally. Their biggest demonstration happened in Torino, with 7,000 attendants, followed by Milan with 5,000. In Florence there were 1,500, in Rome 1,000, in Modena only 500, and so on. In the small town of Alessandria, demonstrators numbered a mere 67, and in Andria there were only six. So even if we exaggerate the numbers, all of their rallies combined would have resulted in a maximum of 100,000.

 
But in typical progressive fashion, they hope to make the docile majority feel like they’re part of the mean, intolerant minority by manipulating the numbers. Push-push, nudge-mudge, you’re a bigot if you don’t support our cause, which in this case is the “Cirinnà Bill.”
 
Presented by Senator Monica Cirinnà, the legislation currently being debated by the Italian parliament would allow same-sex unions and homosexual adoptions. And the narrative the leftist media wanted to establish was of course that a majority of Italians were all on board the gay agenda express. Instead, On Italy’s Family Day, the Catholic Majority spoke ~

The Family Day of January 30th brought to light the existence of another Italy, quite different from the relativist and “pornomania” one proposed to us by the media as the only real one.
 
The Italy of Family Day is that portion of the population, much larger than we can perhaps imagine, that has remained faithful, or has won back in recent years, what Benedict XVI defined as “the non-negotiable values”: life, the family, the education of children, with the conviction that only on these pillars can a well-ordered society be founded.

The Italy of Family Day is not only an Italy that defends the institution of the family, it is also an Italy that has marshalled against the enemies of the family; the first being the activist group behind the screen of the Cirinnà law which wants to impose an ideology and pansexual practice on the Country. This minority is sustained by the European Union, by the Marxist-Illuminist lobby, and by Freemasonry of various levels and grades – and which – unfortunately, enjoys the sympathy and benevolence of a section of the bishops and Catholic movements.

As Church Militant explains, the Italians who rallied on January 30th are not financed by lobbies ~

…(their) core beliefs are hated by the European Union and mocked daily by the press and the “intellectuals” of the media that too often have their salaries paid by the taxpayer. These people organized themselves with their own means and traveled thousands of miles with their children to attend a rally organized by people exactly like them: volunteers who get ridiculed every time they go on television, whose words are distorted in every interview, and for whom the press offers little more than contempt.

In the closing speech at Family Day, Massimo Gandolfini said, “People keep telling us we are the tail-end of Europe, that we’re behind. We are not. We’re ahead. We are the light that is going to guide everyone back to civilization.”

 
Let’s pray that’s true.
 

As a rather ominous side note ~

Antonio Socci in “Libero” of January 31st, notes how Pope Francis’ “absence and palpable aloofness was very evident”. He didn’t even as much as send a greeting to Family Day and there was no mention of it at all at Saturday morning’s general audience nor at the Angelus the day after. How are we to judge this silence, just when the Italian Government and Parliament are about to inflict a moral wound on our country?

 
Lack of papal support didn’t dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm ~

“An ecstatic and defiant crowd at #familyday2016! However, never since the Rennissance have Italian Catholics despised a Pope more than Pope Francis. Those present here are the backbone of Italian Catholicism, and they cannot believe the Pope abandoned them to the secular lions in Parliament, abandoned the few faithful bishops and did not even say a single word at his Jubilee General Audience today. Yet, they are not angry at Francis, it’s more a mix of deep disdain and a strong sentiment of Fremdscham, as the Germans say.”

 
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Related:

UN report: ‘There is no definition of the family’ ~ Well that’s it then. The United Nations has decreed – after how many thousands of years of human civilization (?) – that the fundamental building block of virtually every society ever… is suddenly undefinable.