The common sense of lemon

This article is published in number 14 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 6, 2021

In Italy we have an emergency that no one will ever denounce enough: kisses in the subway. Now he finally took the field Future, courageous newspaper of the Italian bishops. Its director replied to a reader who asked for an account of the Valle Aurelia episode in Rome (the one in which two young people who were lovingly kissing were attacked in a subway stop by a thug who felt the civic duty to go to them. lead, jumping two subway tracks). The modern reader asked the editor what to do, suggesting that “if people – a man and a woman or two homosexuals – kiss in public, regardless of the feelings of those around them, it is no wonder that someone, more annoyed of those who remain to watch or turn their heads away to avoid seeing, verbally or physically assault them ». The director replies in kind: it is a question of “educating everyone to the sacrosanct respect for others and to the conventional but no less important basic rules of civil coexistence and, therefore, also of polite public behavior”. But it certainly does not speak of the energetic track-jumper. No, rather she addresses the two kissers: because obviously it is not a problem of homophobia (and a law that condemns her “would not solve the problem, if anything it would complicate it”); but of “good education”. It is a tough battle but it deserves to be fought. Let us all give a hand to the Bishops’ Conference against this scourge: the metropolitan lemon makers.

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