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Italian President Sergio Mattarella

ROME, May 11, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) — A petition denouncing the increasing infiltration of “gender theory” at all grade levels in the Italian education system, signed by 180,517 Italian citizens and supported by 41 parents' associations and organizations, was delivered to the office of President Sergio Mattarella ahead of last week's pro-life conferences and massive March for Life in Rome.

The petition, called “For a healthy education on sexuality in the schools,” is addressed to Mattarella, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, and Minister of Education Stefania Giannini.

“We are pleased with the sensitivity of President Mattarella towards the issues of the family and the education of our children,” said pro-life leader Antonio Brandi, President of Pro Vita Onlus, in a statement to LifeSiteNews.

“But it is sad to note that it took two months to collect the almost two hundred thousand signatures, and for more than two months not to be able to get a meeting with the Minister of Education, Giannini, who cancelled two meetings in the period, and who previously promised that the parents associations were going to be consulted on their children's education and that the ‘guidelines’ on the ‘fight against the discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation’ would be rewritten.” 

The salient points of the petition ask the state “to respect the role of the family in the education of the children in affectivity and sexuality issues as well as to apply the constitutional definition of the family as a natural society founded on marriage,” and that the state undertake “to educate all students to recognize the value and the beauty of biological sexual differences and to educate them to respect the bodies of others and respect the times of their affective and sexual maturation.”

“We asked in our letter to the President of the Republic to intervene with its legal and moral authority, with all the relevant State bodies, so that appropriate measures are taken,” Brandi told LifeSiteNews. “We shall certainly continue our struggle and continue seeking to meet Premier Renzi and Education Minister Giannini.”

The letter accompanying the petition, addressed personally to President Mattarella, points out that Pope Francis has denounced the introduction of “gender theory” as an “ideological colonization.”

The pope has repeatedly and very strongly condemned the foundational tenets of “gender theory” as one of the intellectual underpinnings of the homosexualist political movement as well as the basis of radical feminism.

The letter concludes that without the called-for action, the government “risks ruining, from an early age, the most vulnerable citizens and those most in need of protection, and, in the ultimate analysis, ruining Italy's future.”

The Pro Vita Onlus petition is available here.