"If the President of the Region of Lazio continues in this vein, before long he will be calling for gays [and "communists", divorcees, Jews, prostitutes, non-EU immigrants, those with the HIV virus and women who have had abortions] to be all locked up in a concentration camp or forced to go round with a yellow or red triangle."
The above remark by a writer and social commentator, Natalia Aspesi, carried in the Rome daily La Repubblica last week, reflects something of the growing hullabaloo about the forthcoming World Gay Pride festival to be held in Rome from July 1st to 8th.
What might have been little more than a colourful gathering has been transformed into a bitterly divisive issue, calling into question the most fundamental of civil liberties in a modern democracy.
When Gay Pride announced in March 1997 that it intended to organise a festival in Rome in the Jubilee Year 2000, it was easy to predict problems. A major Gay Pride demonstration on the doorstep of the Catholic Church HQ, a church which teaches that the practice of homosexuality is a sin, was never likely to pass off unnoticed.
It may well be, as detractors of the Gay Pride festival claim, that the time and place selected by Gay Pride amount to nothing less than provocation, intended to forcibly underline its rejection of Catholic teaching on homosexuality even at the cost of possibly offending some of the thousands of Catholic pilgrims.
If the Gay Pride intentions were provocative, they have already achieved their aim. In an Italian society that is generally extremely tolerant, the Gay Pride organisers may have touched on a surprisingly raw nerve which would indicate that a large section of the Italian establishment, left and right, has difficulty in "coming out" in support of homosexual rights.
While it was only to be expected that senior Italian church figures such as Cardinal Camillo Ruini, president of the Italian Bishops' Conference, should last week call for the festival to be postponed so that it would not coincide with the Jubilee celebrations, the same can hardly be said of either the centre-left Prime Minister, Giuliano Amato, or the centre-left Mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli.
No one can be much surprised if the Catholic Church has found a ready ally in the formerly fascist Alleanza Nazionale (AN) in its campaign to have the march either postponed or banned. Two years ago the AN leader, Gianfranco Fini, publicly argued that homosexuals should not be allowed to work as schoolteachers.
The most recent hostilities in the row about Gay Pride were opened by one of Mr Fini's lieutenants, Francesco Storace, the Lazio regional president referred to by Natalia Aspesi in the opening quote to this article. Fresh from his regional electoral victory last month, Mr Storace lost no time in calling for the march to be banned.
To some extent, all of this is understandable. Cardinal Ruini and Mr Storace are following the dictates of their faith and their electoral constituency. What was much more surprising was to hear Mr Amato last week call the Gay Pride march "inopportune", adding in an unfortunate slip of the tongue that "unfortunately there's the constitution" with its guarantees of freedom of speech, assembly and (peaceful) demonstration.
Even more unexpected was Monday's announcement by Mayor Rutelli that the Rome City Council would be withdrawing both its endorsement and its financial sponsorship of the festival.
Faced with a barrage of hostile reaction, the mayor yesterday met with a Gay Pride delegation, guaranteeing that the festival would go ahead and agreeing to partially restore city funding.
Significantly, though, the mayor kept his distance by confirming the suspension of the city's endorsement while also repeating his frustration at "the all too evident unwillingness of the Gay Pride organisers to come to an agreement on how the event should be run".
It may be entirely without significance, but Messrs Amato and Rutelli have since found themselves facing criticism from an entirely unexpected source, their wives.
Mr Amato's normally reserved wife, Diana, told Alessio di Giorgi of the magazine Gay.it that she did not agree with her husband's views on the march while Barbara Palombelli, wife of Mr Rutelli, said this week she was "absolutely in favour" of the march.
Bitter tension between the gay community worldwide and the Catholic Church is only to be expected, given Catholic teaching.
If there is a new element in the Gay Pride row of recent weeks, it concerns the re-emergence of a powerful coalition of right-wing Catholic Church forces (Cardinal Ruini certainly fits that bill) with right-wing political forces (AN).
Fresh from its (regional) electoral triumph, AN has been beating a particularly illiberal, anti-gay drum that seems to have intimidated Messrs Amato and Rutelli.
If, as expected, centre-right forces led by Silvio Berlusconi, including AN, win next year's general election, can we expect more of the same moral intimidation on a whole variety of social issues? The response to this summer's Gay Pride march may hold the answer.