“HABEMUS GAGA, be proud.” Addressing an estimated one million gay rights activists at the Circus Maximus in Rome on Saturday night, US pop idol Lady Gaga called gays “the revolutionaries of love” while appealing for “full equality now” for same-sex couples.
If the Lady Gaga fans, many of whom had waited for hours in the Roman sun, had been expecting a lengthy gig from the world’s latest gay icon, they were to be disappointed.
In truth, the pop star seemed more concerned with talking than singing, performing just two songs but telling a wildly enthusiastic EuroPride crowd: “We’re all from the same DNA. We were just born this way . . . I stand here as a woman of the world and I ask governments, with you, worldwide to facilitate our dream of equality.”
In particular, Lady Gaga criticised the governments of Lithuania, Russia, Poland, Hungary and others in the Middle East for their failure to grant fundamental human rights to gays.
Earlier in the day, the typically colourful and noisy EuroPride march had crossed the centre of Rome with many marchers branding banners with slogans such as “Different People, Same Rights”, “Love is a Human Right”, “Papa No, Gaga Si”.
Inevitably, the Vatican was the target of much criticism from marchers, with one large banner showing the cupola of St Peter’s with two lines crossed through it and the slogan, “No Vat”.
One marcher was dressed as a bishop, with the words “Paedophilia” and “Sex Abuse” written on his vestments in an obvious reference to the Catholic Church’s clerical sex abuse crisis. Church teaching considers the practice of homosexuality a sin, while it calls homosexuality a “disordered condition”.
On the same day that gay pride activists were marching in the Eternal City, Pope Benedict held a first audience for the worldwide gypsy and Roma communities.
Some 2,000 travelling people from the Roma, Sinti, Manouche, Kale, Yenish and Romanichais communities in different European countries, heard the Pope tell them: “You are part of the church! You are a much-loved part of the nomadic people of God and you remind us that, as it says in Hebrews, “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” Making reference to the “painful and complex” history of the gypsy communities, the Pope recalled how “hundreds of thousands of women, men and children were barbarously executed in concentration camps”, adding that “never again should your people be the object of vexation, rejection and contempt”.