“You want divorce? Then know this: next will come abortion. And after that, same-sex marriage. And maybe your wife will leave you to run off with the maid!” – Amintore Fanfani (former PM) on the Italian divorce referendum, 1974

https://i.redd.it/rqp2zomcylef1.jpeg

by BkkGrl

32 comments

  1. “*Signor* Fanfani, we didn’t need to be sold any further on the referendum.”

  2. “And after that you’ll be subjected to CBT by femboys with cat ears and maid costumes.” Oh no the horror! 😳

  3. “If you let people do what they want, you can’t bind them to you unhappily using the law as your shackles.” – this fucking guy

  4. Don’t worry Fanfani, wives can still nowadays run off with the CEO

  5. Idk, maybe if the wife runs off with the maid, there’s bigger issues than regulation in the marriage?

  6. How scary it would be if all free, adult human beings would have a right to self-determination. Pfff…

  8. Cool, man, sounds like a plan, like everyone can just be what they want and be happy about it without the government interfering in their personal and private affairs.

  9. It’s so oddly specific I am starting to think his wife did leave him to run off with the maid.

  11. Than god they give them the middle fingers at the time, the Catholic Church still needs to receive many middle fingers from us Italians before we are free of their curse

  12. So basically still what conservatives are yelling about 50 years later…

  14. I’m not sure I understand. Is he worried about his wife leaving him, or about the maid?

  16. I mean I must agree with him. We want divorces if needed, we want access to abortions and same sex marriage.

  20. It is insane that there can be a belief that people can’t divorce if the relationship isn’t working out for either of them.

  22. If the only thing that stops your wife from leaving you is that she can’t divorce, than mby you’re the problem

  23. “If people taste freedom in one topic, they will want it in other topics too. How dare they! Life should be miserable for everyone forever! Especially for people I don’t like, like women and queers.”

    -That guy, probably

  25. God forbid people aren’t bound by arbitrary rules created by random people.

  27. Why in world would anyone want to live with someone who resents them and resents the child they were forced to bear, why? How miserable do you have to be to feel like even an unhappy marriage is better than none? As the guy, I mean?

    Geee, I wonder why older generations had so many jokes about hating or cheating on their spouse when this was their view on marriage: shackle yourself to someone who hates you, doesn’t want you anymore, never wanted you, but they have no choice. Bring children into this, she resents you, you resent her, but by all means, force yourselves to stay together. What for?

    I will never understand how someone could be this dysfunctional, or is it nothing more than stupidity and an inability to imagine something beyond your man-made personal hell on Earth?

  28. “If given a choice my wife would leave me as fast as she could!” is a hell of a way to tell on yourself.

  30. I mean, he was correct. After divorce was legalised, abortions were legalised. And then same-sex marriages. And a lot of women left their husband for another woman.

    The thing is, that’s how it should be.

  31. I’ve never understood the argument that you should just live in misery with someone you don’t get on with. It makes absolutely no sense. Ireland went through this same nonsense in the 1990s, and honestly, it’s hard to believe it was ever was the case that there was no right to divorce here. I remember the far right posters “Hello Divorce. Bye Bye Daddy.”

    Social conservatives here in those days (70s-90s) often didn’t see themselves as “right wing” – they peddled a sort of ‘Catholic social democracy ideology’ – which basically boiled down to socially aware, but morally very far right especially on anything to do with reproduction, yet could play a guitar and paint themselves as progressives. They’d basically hidden the crosier, fire and brimstone behind a more palatable hippy dippy facade.

    One of my older relatives emigrated and lived basically in exile for decades because she couldn’t formally exit a very abusive and violent relationship in the early 1960s, and her ex kept harassing her and she couldn’t get cleanly away from him, despite barring orders etc and couldn’t marry her new partner.

    My family had to arrange to get her setup elsewhere abroad under an assumed name – it wasn’t all that unusual tbh. People used to just leave and abandon lives rather than stick with the bullshit that went on here around lack of divorce here in the 20th century.

    Even after divorce legislation came in here, for a long time it was like something that was trying to be modern no fault divorce, but has been edited by a conservative Catholic nun to keep the old stuffy types on side. You had to be separated for 4 of the previous 5 years before you could get a divorce, which dragged it into a sort of legal limbo / purgatory, during which your life was on hold and it even created complications for mortgages, loans and all sorts of things as your divorce was pending. That was drastically shortened by a subsequent referendum, but it was a cruel and nasty bureaucratic twist designed to punish anyone with a “failed” marriage basically. In reality, courts and judges were far more humane, and just started to accept that people could be separated while living together if they made a statement that their marriage has ended, but it was a weird mess. The recent adjustments to the law just reflect that reality.

    Now it’s just unthinkable that it was ever so conservative, but that’s how things were. There was a major paradigm shift in the 1990s for a whole variety of reasons, but basically the church had dramatically lost its vice like grip on social policy, which it had been used to since the 1930s.

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