Italy government split by gay rights divide

ROME, March 6 (Reuters) Paola Binetti says homosexuality is ''deviant''. Franco Grillini is openly and proudly gay. The problem for Prime Minister Romano Prodi is that both are parliamentarians in his centre-left coalition.

The split over gay rights is a constant conflict in Prodi's Catholics-to-Communists coalition. A bill that would give rights to unwed couples, including gays, goes before parliament today.

''This is going to be very messy,'' said Professor James Walston, head of the international relations department of the American University of Rome.

''It's a fight between the Church and secular forces, the divide that has always bedevilled Italy.'' The internal tensions boiled over recently when Binetti, a member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, said on a television talk show that ''homosexuality is a deviance of the personality''.

Grillini, on the same show, called her a ''racist''.

Prodi resigned last month after leftist defections forced his government to lose a foreign policy vote in the Senate. To come out of the crisis and remain prime minister, he asked leaders of his nine-party coalition to sign a new 12-point plan.

The draft bill, which the cabinet approved in early February, was conspicuously absent from the plan. Prodi said the matter was now in parliament's hands but promised his leftist allies that it ''has not been dumped overboard''.

But, faced with opposition from the Catholic Church, many observers think that if it gets through parliament it will be so watered down it will emerge unrecognisable.

Monsignor Elio Sgrecia, a top Vatican official for ethical issues, told Catholics this week they had a duty to kill the provision because ''it goes against natural law''.

The bill guarantees rights to both hetero- and homosexual unwed couples in areas like inheritance and health care.

Prodi, a practising Catholic, and others who support the bill have said the Church has nothing to fear.

''The law doesn't try to replace the family or compete with marriage,'' Anna Finocchiaro, whip of two large leftist parties in the Senate, told a newspaper today.

But Enzo Carra, one of the so-called Catholic ''teodems'' (theological democrats) in the coalition, vowed that Catholic lawmakers would ''do our best to bury it once and for all''.

Catholic politicians fear the bill is a ''Trojan horse'' to eventually allow gay marriage and centrist Justice Minister Clemente Mastella has vowed to fight it in parliament.

Walston and others say the bill would not lead to a government crisis unless hard leftists force the issue.

''(Prodi) has got it out of the way for now by putting it on someone else's cooker,'' said Walston. ''The problem is that it was his cabinet who approved it and sent it to parliament.'' REUTERS MS PM1711