By Angelo Amante

ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s culture wars have begun.

Almost six months after taking office, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government is pushing out bills that promise to promote national identity, defend the traditional family, protect cultural heritage and hold back migrants.

Recent proposals include a bill to safeguard the Italian language and a ban on lab-grown food. The government is also making it harder for same-sex parents to register their children, in a move which drew condemnation from the European Parliament.

Critics say the welter of legislation is aimed at disguising the fact that the coalition is struggling to make headway in more crucial areas, such as utilising European Union post-COVID-19 pandemic funds.

“These ‘identity’ choices can spark tensions with the EU in the long term, especially when it comes to civil rights issues,” said Massimiliano Panarari, a political communication expert at Unimercatorum university.

Last month Brussels froze a 19-billion-euro ($20.76 billion) tranche of the money, requesting clarification on Rome’s efforts to meet the agreed policy targets needed to obtain the transfers.

On civil rights, Meloni vaunts the importance of traditional family values, in a country which already lags behind most of western Europe on LBGT rights.

Government lawmakers say policies to protect heritage were always going to be a key part of their agenda, and Italy has for years undervalued its rich, historic patrimony.

“We do not have diamonds, or big oil and gas resources,” said Fabio Rampelli, a senior member of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.

“Italian mines are made up of culture, gastronomy, language, arts, fashion, history, archaeology and monuments. This is what we can offer to the world, and what we can improve.”

Taking the lead, Rampelli last month put forward a bill proposing fines of up to 100,000 euros ($109,000) for Italian companies and public entities that use foreign terms, most notably English, instead of the national language in their official documents or communication.

The opposition Five Star Movement ridiculed the idea, pointing out that the government itself had added the English term “Made in Italy” to the title of the industry minister when it took office last year.

“Identity messages are meant to tell the electorate that Brothers of Italy will not give up its line,” analyst Panarari said.

‘GREAT IN THE WORLD’

Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida defended the ban on lab-grown food by saying it was incompatible with Italy’s culinary history and potentially dangerous for health.

Meloni herself has called for the creation of a “Made in Italy” high school to teach students the creative and business skills which made the nation “great in the world”, a proposed law presented by her party said.

When Meloni won power last year, there was widespread concern in Europe about her post-fascist political roots, fearing she would follow the authoritarian path trod by her old political friend – Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

She has largely defied her critics, avoiding tough confrontation at home and clashes with Brussels, which was a regular target of her fiery rhetoric in previous years

But she has not rowed back on electoral promises to be hard on immigration. One of her first acts was to curb the operations of charity rescue ships in an effort to reduce the time they could spend at sea looking for migrants.

In her autobiography “I am Giorgia”, published in 2021, Meloni compared mass immigration to the forced transfers of populations in the old Soviet Union, aimed at diluting local customs and religions.

“The right wants to preserve these same deep-rooted identities that the left wants to cancel,” she wrote, warning of the dangers of “ethnic substitution” and the dilution of Europe’s Christian culture.

Opinion polls suggest that voters are broadly supportive of the government’s actions, with backing for Brothers of Italy seen at 29% in recent polls, slightly lower than at the start of the year but up from the 26% it scored in the October ballot.

“I believe these are attempts to divert attention away from the real challenges, including the economy, and to lure us into an ideological debate,” said Alessandro Alfieri, a senator with the opposition centre-left Democratic Party (PD).

Other critics on the left accuse the government of being stuck in a defensive pose, wanting time to stand still – a charge the culture minister rejects.

“Being conservative means relying on the sense of history, on tradition to seek the way to the future, it does not mean rejecting change,” Gennaro Sangiuliano told a seminar last week on the construction of an Italian cultural identity.

“It means mastering (change), orienting it to the deep sense of the history of a community.”

(Reporting by Angelo Amante; Editing by Crispian Balmer, Gavin Jones and)

By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) – The federal judge who on Friday suspended approval of the abortion pill mifepristone is a former Christian legal activist whose small courthouse in Amarillo, Texas, has become a go-to destination for conservatives challenging Biden administration policies.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump, had a long track record of opposing abortion and LGBTQ rights before the U.S. Senate confirmed him in 2019 to a life-tenured position as a federal judge.

Now on the bench, he has routinely ruled against Democratic causes. Since October alone, Kacsmaryk has blocked an end to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” immigration program and ruled against Biden administration policies designed to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in the workplace and at doctors’ offices.

Kacsmaryk did not respond to a request for comment.

When anti-abortion groups in November filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s more than two-decade old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, they filed in Amarillo, guaranteeing the case would be heard by Kacsmaryk.

Although his ruling on Friday was preliminary and not on the merits of the case, Kacsmaryk indicated he thought the challenge was substantially likely to succeed. He said that the FDA had ignored risks in approving the drug.

His ruling used language common in anti-abortion circles. Mifepristone, he said, is used to “kill unborn humans.” He disclaimed the use of the word “fetuses” as “inaccurately describing unborn humans,” noting they might be “persons” entitled to equal protection rights. He also described some of the defense arguments as supporting “eugenics.”

Josh Blackman, a conservative law professor at South Texas College of Law who knows Kacsmaryk, compared his judicial philosophy to that of two of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most conservative justices, Justice Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

“He’s not a moderate,” Blackman said.

‘SHADOWY PENUMBRAS’

Kacsmaryk left a position as a federal prosecutor in 2014 to join the Christian legal group First Liberty Institute, where as its deputy general he fought against LGBTQ anti-discrimination protections, same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

In that role, he called abortion rights supporters “sexual revolutionaries” in a 2015 article that was critical of the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, which had guaranteed a national right to abortion, until the high court overturned it last year.

Kacsmaryk called Roe v. Wade a ruling in which “seven justices of the Supreme Court found an unwritten ‘fundamental right’ to abortion hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the shadowy ‘penumbras’ of the Bill of Rights, a celestial phenomenon invisible to the non-lawyer eye.”

During his time with the Christian legal group, he helped oppose a federal mandate that employer-provided health insurance cover women’s birth control, and fought a Washington state law requiring pharmacists to stock a “representative assortment of drugs” to meet patient needs, including emergency contraception medications.

His nomination to the bench was part of a push during Trump’s tenure to tilt the judiciary to the right. Trump got a near-record 234 judicial nominees confirmed, including Kacsmaryk, who like many other Trump appointees belongs to the conservative Federalist Society.

Facing fierce opposition from LGBTQ groups and Democrats, Kacsmaryk testified before a December 2017 Senate Judiciary Committee that it would be “inappropriate” for judges to allow their religious convictions to influence their rulings.

He won Senate confirmation on a party-line 52–46 vote in 2019, with only one Republican, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, voting against him at the time, citing his “alarming bias” against LGBTQ people.

FAVORED VENUE

Since then, his courthouse has become a favored venue for conservative legal activists and Republican state attorneys general pursuing lawsuits seeking to halt aspects of Democratic President Joe Biden’s agenda – often with success.

In October, Kacsmaryk vacated Biden administration guidance requiring employers to allow transgender workers to dress and use bathrooms consistent with their gender identities.

A month later, he ruled the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under Biden had wrongly interpreted a provision of the Affordable Care Act as barring healthcare providers from discriminating against gay and transgender people.

Kacsmaryk has also ruled for birth control foes, ruling in December that allowing minors to obtain free contraception though the Title X federal program without parental consent was unlawful.

He is currently presiding over a lawsuit filed by the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense and others accusing media companies, including Reuters, of violating federal antitrust laws by working with tech companies to censor information about COVID-19. A Reuters spokesperson has denied the allegations.

The fact that conservatives have been able to steer so many cases to Kacsmaryk’s courthouse in the 14th largest city in Texas involves an obscure local order that assigns 95% of federal civil cases to him, its lone judge.

The order virtually guarantees litigants suing in Amarillo get Kacsmaryk and not any of the 12 other active judges in the Northern District of Texas, which also covers Dallas, Fort Worth and other cities.

The Biden administration has sought to transfer at least one case away from Kacsmaryk, accusing a group of Republican state attorneys general of “judge shopping” by filing a lawsuit challenging a rule that allows socially conscious investing by employee retirement plans in Amarillo to get Kacsmaryk. The judge rejected the administration’s bid to move that case in late March, saying it had provided no evidence that the litigation did not belong in his court or that plaintiffs were attempting to manipulate the process.

While the district’s chief judge could order cases be reallocated, he has not. Supporters of the current practice note that it ensures someone living in Amarillo and suing there does not need to drive five-plus hours to Dallas for a court hearing.

Sarah Lipton-Lubet, executive director of the progressive legal advocacy group Take Back the Court said, “conservative litigants know that they can make all sorts of outlandish arguments, because they know that right wing judges, and this judge in particular, are going to be receptive.” (This story has been refiled to fix dateline)

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Bill Berkrot and Diane Craft)

Almost two months after Don Lemon dissed Nikki Haley, he is now coming for Jon Stewart.

The TV personality, 57, showed a clip of the comedian, 60, interviewing U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, where Stewart commented how wasteful the budget is.

“I can’t figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. To me, that’s f****** corruption,” Stewart replied after Hicks challenged him.

The video of the interview stayed on the screen, but the audio cut out, then Lemon could be heard talking to his co-hosts about the situation.

“He gets a lot of leeway with the comedian thing, though,” Lemon said before attempting to recover from the awkward moment.

Lemon insisted that Stewart is much more than a comedian, which he repeated multiple times.

Of course, people couldn’t help but weigh in on Lemon’s comments.

One person wrote, “Ha, Jon Stewart as a comedian/activist has done more to change our country for the positive than @donlemon could ever dream of,” while another said, “He’s an angry resentful insecure gay man that hates women.”

A third person added, “Good grief, what is going to be coming out of his mouth next.”

As OK! previously reported, the CNN star’s past behavior was exposed whenVariety revealed he called one of his producers fat to her face and mocked Nancy Grace on-air.

“That was the beginning of when you knew that Don was kind of volatile and didn’t say good things about women,” an insider said of the Grace incident.

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Lemon has also angered his colleagues with his “diva-like behavior,” as he would skip editorial calls, show up late to the newsroom or exhibit disengaged behavior.

Things got worse in 2009 when Anderson Cooper and Lemon covered Michael Jackson‘s memorial from inside. However, Cooper ended up getting more airtime, leading Lemon to become jealous.

“That led to a come-to-Jesus moment,” a senior executive spilled. “Don was told, ‘Look, you’ve got to address your behavior. Your performance as a reporter is great. It’s your behavior that’s gotta improve. It’s what’s going to derail you if you’re not careful.’”

Howard Stern said that he was “dumbfounded” after watching Kid Rock‘s Bud Light protest video, RadarOnline.com has learned, explaining the music star seemed to be “really bent out of shape” over the beer company’s partnership with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney.

Although Kid Rock did not mention her by name in the viral clip, the American Bad Ass hitmaker made sure to deliver a “clear and concise” message following Mulvaney’s recent promotion with their signature blue and white cans by shooting up full cases.

“F— Bud Light, and f— Anheuser-Busch,” Kid Rock said. “Have a terrific day.”

SiriusXM’sThe Howard Stern Show covered the controversy on Monday’s episode, with him asking why Kid Rock and country star Travis Tritt were so upset and “lost their s— over this beer can thing.”

“I thought there must be a piece of this story that I’m missing and I don’t know why — I’m not bothered by gay people or transsexual people. They don’t impact my life,” Stern continued.

The Bud Light vice president said just days before Mulvaney’s collab was revealed that her marketing strategy for the brand has been to incorporate inclusivity while also appealing to “women and to men” as well as a younger demographic.

Alissa Heinerscheid, who became the first woman to lead Bud Light last year, said that BL had been “in decline for a really long time” during her recent interview.

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Tritt sounded off not long after Kid Rock, announcing that he would be removing all related products from his hospitality tour rider in protest, a choice Stern was baffled by.

“They don’t hurt my life,” Stern said of the gay and transexual community. “I love when people are in love. You wanna be a woman, be a woman, you wanna be a dude, be a dude … Long as you ain’t hurting anybody, I’m on your team.”

Stern said he would like to book Kid Rock for the show to explain.

“He transitioned from some kid in Michigan to a rock superstar. And that was a good transition,” the media personality added. “I’m really dumbfounded by why someone would care so much that they would blow up a can of Bud Light.”

Stern then reflected on Kid Rock’s rise to fame, explaining that “he would wear a feather boa — you know, when he first started out with maybe even a mink coat, you know what I mean? He was flamboyant in his own way.”

Kid Rock has yet to respond to criticism of his protest video.

Britney Spears is apparently much different when she is not performing for a huge crowd, according to Fenton Bailey, who directed the singer’s 2013 documentary, I Am Britney Jean.

“Because of ‘Oops, I Did It Again’ or ‘Slave 4 U’ we think she’s just, like, [a] charged up sex strumpet,” Bailey told Andy Cohen during his appearance on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy of the pop star’s hit songs.

“That’s not who she is,” he elaborated. “On the stage she is, but in real life, she’s shy, very introverted. And as she has kept on saying, ‘I’m just a normal, boring person.'”

In the documentary, the blonde babe, who is married to Sam Asghari, said she thinks she’s “not really made for this industry.”

“I have always been kind of shy, since I was a little girl. It’s who I am to be modest, so I really can’t help it,” she admitted. “I turn into this different person [when I perform] … seriously, bipolar disorder.”

As OK! previously reported, Spears, 41, was freed from her conservatorship in 2021, and since then, she hasn’t been shy about posting about her antics on social media. From dancing in front of the camera to showing off mirror selfies.

Despite the questionable behavior, Spears insisted she’s all there and doing just fine.

After fans called the cops to check in on the “Toxic” songstress, she spoke out about the ordeal.

“This felt like I was being gaslit and bullied once the incident made it to the news and being portrayed once again in a poor and unfair light by the media,” she wrote on Twitter at the time. “During this time in my life, I truly hope the public and my fans who I care so much about can respect my privacy moving forward.”

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For now, Spears seems to be living her best life while on vacation. Though she’s not with her hubby — and she and Asghari have been spotted without their wedding bands — the actor’s rep insisted there are no marital issues between them.

The 29-year-old hunk took off his jewelry since he’s currently filming a movie.