Two Committees have been formed for the possible referendum battle against the legalization of drugs and of the homicide of consenting persons. A difficult but necessary battle.
by Stefano Nitoglia
During the 2021 year-end press conference, held on December 22, the Italian Prime Minister, Mario Draghi, responding to a question about the referendums on the legalization of drugs and on the consensual homicide, said: «The government will not stand (in the relative judgments before the Constitutional Court, ed.) against the admissibility of these referendums», adding: «It could have created the conditions for their presentation to be postponed until next year, but it did not do so».
With this statement, Draghi has taken a position in favor of the two referendums. It is, in fact, a non-neutral choice, given that the Government has usually participated in the judgments of admissibility of referendums before the Constitutional Court, giving mandate to the State Attorney to defend existing laws. Suffice it to recall, on these non-negotiable issues, the referendum to repeal Law No. 40/2004 on medically assisted procreation.
Not only that. The head of the government has boasted of having presented and approved two decree-laws that have twice extended the deadline for the collection of signatures for the referendum on drugs, which otherwise would not have reached the 500,000 signatures required. On the occasion of the second extension (from September 30 to October 31, 2021), the “Radical Party” leader, Riccardo Magi, one of the promoters of the referendum on the legalization of the use of cannabis had exclaimed: «Even Draghi is in favor of the law of the law on cannabis» (“La Repubblica”, 28.9.2021).
«This is not neutrality: it is a precise and unequivocal choice towards a libertarian and death drift», reads a statement of the “Centro Studi Livatino”, of December 22.
It is a serious decision because, in the case of the referendum – improperly called by the media “on euthanasia” (with the war of words won once again by the radical culture, since the term evokes the so-called “good death”) – what is actually discussed is the homicide of the consenting person, because the referendum proposes the repeal of art. 579 of the Italian Penal Code, which punishes exactly this case. And, in fact, the question reads as follows: «Do you want to abrogate art. 579 of the Penal Code (“Homicide of the consenting person”) approved by […], paragraph 1, limited to the following words “imprisonment from six to fifteen years.”; paragraph 2, in its entirety; paragraph 3, limited to the following words “shall apply”?».
Article 579, based on the principle of the unavailability of human life, punishes with imprisonment from 6 to 15 years anyone who causes the death of a person with his consent. This is a special provision, with respect to the general provision – art. 575 of the Italian Penal Code – which punishes murder with a heavier term of imprisonment, not less than 21 years.
The referendum on the homicide of the consenting person, as expressly stated in the question (see above) and as it has been classified by the Court of Cassation during the validation of the signatures collected, is part of a trail of death that has accelerated since the sad story of Eluana Englaro, when the Supreme Court, with the sentence No. 21748 of October 16, 2007, established that nutrition and hydration constitute medical treatment if performed artificially and that, therefore, as medical treatment can be interrupted in some cases (vegetative state of the subject and with his consent, inferable from elements of all generic, such as his personality, his previous statements, lifestyle, etc.).
In this sad affair, the approval of Law No. 219/2017 (on advance treatment dispositions – and the use of the term dispositions instead of declarations is significant) is inserted, which gave legal value to the contents of the Englaro judgment, establishing that nutrition and hydration are medical treatments.
Finally, the Constitutional Court, judging on the legitimacy of art. 580 of the Italian Penal Code, on the subject of assisted suicide, in the well-known case “Cappato and dj Fabo”, after inviting the Parliament to legislate on the subject, giving it coordinates, in the face of the immobility of the legislature, has established with the judgment No. 242/2019 thatgoes exempt from criminal liability who helps to suicide if the judge assesses that the patient «is suffering from an irreversible pathology, source of physical or psychological suffering that he considers intolerable».
As for the referendum “on cannabis”, it actually aims at the abrogation of any provision that punishes the cultivation of any kind of narcotic, not only of cannabis, therefore also opium, hallucinogenic mushrooms and coca.
In light of these considerations, the behavior of the Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who with his statements at the end of the year press conference and with the facilitation of the process of collecting signatures, sided in favor of the referendum, appears very serious. It is not, in fact a “neutral” behavior but a real choice of field; the field of death and libertarian drift.
After the anarchist and libertarian movement of ’68 and the end of ideologies, following the implosion of the Soviet Empire after the collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989), and the end of the USSR (1991), the Revolution seems to have married technocracy, in what Giovanni Cantoni (1938-2020) called “the last disguise of ideology, the technocratic one” (Giovanni Cantoni, “Nota sulla tentazione tecnocratica”, in “Cristianità”, n. 170, 1989, citing the Apostolic Letter “Octogesima Adveniens” of St. Paul VI). Today, in Italy, technocracy takes on the respectable and reassuring face of Mario Draghi and combines the compression of democracy, by reducing more and more the spaces of freedom, with the culture of death and high. It is necessary to react to this umpteenth, last and, perhaps, most dangerous disguise of anti-Christian ideologies, denouncing firmly and without fear its nature. Looking closely at the forces that support the referendum, any form of reaction seems destined to defeat, since there are too many powers that are aligned in favor of the culture of death and of getting high. However, denouncing evil is important and meritorious because it allows us to overcome the climate of resignation that has taken over the camp of the “good”. Worse than defeat would be silence. That is why it is important to support the two Committees for the “No” to drugs and to the homicide of the consenting person, that were formed in Rome on December 21 and of which we will soon provide all the information necessary to join and participate in their initiatives.
Monday, 2021/12/27