{"id":340998,"date":"2012-03-30T06:35:47","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T04:35:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/slovenia-a-society-that-says-yes-to-the-family\/"},"modified":"2024-06-06T12:06:18","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T10:06:18","slug":"slovenia-a-society-that-says-yes-to-the-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/slovenia-a-society-that-says-yes-to-the-family\/","title":{"rendered":"Slovenia: A society that says \u2018yes\u2019 to the family"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u2018We want to share with you our joy at how the recent referendum turned out,\u2019 write An\u010da and Vine Povirk from Domzale in Slovenia<\/strong><\/a>, members of the Focolare\u2019s New Families Movement<\/strong><\/a>. \u2018It was the result of a great deal of cooperation between various civil and religious movements, and numerous families, all united in a peaceful battle in favour of the family.\u2019 The vast majority of the media and of influential politicians were in favour of the new law that sought, among other things, greater liberalization for same sex couples \u2013 for example, with regard to third-party adoptions, by allowing a same sex couple to adopt the biological child of one of the partners, as well as a whole raft of measures regarding unmarried couples. The \u2018yes\u2019 campaign had huge financial resources (more than 2 million euros), while the \u2018no\u2019 campaign was entirely self-supporting. It was in no sense an equal battle. The initiative, promoted at first only by Catholics, soon drew in other Christians, members of other religions and many who, without professing any specific faith, uphold human values. Together they managed to collect the 40,000 signatures necessary to call for a referendum. It was held on 25 March with a turnout of 30% and, contrary to expectations, the \u2018no\u2019 vote was 55%. \u2018For two and a half years we worked beyond our capabilities and our strength to defend basic family values,\u2019 Marjana and Pavel from Ljubljana<\/strong>\u00a0 – Delegates of the New Humanity Movement<\/a><\/strong> in Slovenia –\u00a0tell us. \u2018We spoke in Parliament, held public events before the vote, organized a Family Day, collected signatures… we wrote to MPs, to the Constitutional Court, speaking many, many times on discussion programmes on television, national and local radio… and in this way we built up numerous friendships with the members of other ecclesial movements, with important people in the sphere of civil life and politicians of various parties… Now, however, we are beginning the most important phase: working to give our contribution to a new law for family life framed around the values we strongly believe to be basic to society and which have their roots in the Gospel.\u2019 A comment put out by Mgr Anton Stres, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Ljubljana and president of the Slovenian Episcopal Conference, thanked \u2018all those who were committed to achieve this aim and to make the electorate aware of the irreplaceable role of the family in our life.\u2019 Nonetheless, the comment continues, \u2018with the outcome of the referendum, family values are not assured; indeed, it is necessary to live them every day in our relationships with one another.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u2018no\u2019 vote wins in a referendum to modify family law in way that risked damaging core values of society\u2019s basic building block.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[893],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focolare-worldwide-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}