Actress Debi Mazar thinks Italy has “a lot of oppression” since “it’s where the Vatican is,” she said Wednesday in an interview with HuffPost Live.
The Queens-born Entourage regular is the lead of a new TV Land series called Younger, where she plays a single mother who is gay.
“I don’t really think in those terms because I just think people should love who they wanna be in love with,” Mazar told host Marc Lamont Hill in the segment. “So I’m just playing someone, Maggie, who’s a person, who happens just to like chicks instead of guys.”
Mazar blamed Catholic influence when asked to comment on the recent tiff between performer Elton John and designers Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce, the team behind the luxury brand Dolce & Gabbana.
“I think unfortunately because of the times we live in with the Internet, I also believe things get lost in translation,” Mazar said. “Italy is a very backwards, old country, to a degree. It’s a very Catholic country. There’s a lot of oppression still there because it is, you know, where the Vatican is, it’s Catholic.”
Dolce and Gabbana, who were a couple for more than two decades before splitting in 2005, recently expressed their support for traditional family structure over options sought by same-sex couples, such as gay adoption and in vitro fertilization.
"We oppose gay adoptions. The only family is the traditional one,” the designers said in an interview with Italy’s Panorama magazine. Procreation “must be an act of love,” Dolce told the magazine, adding, “You are born to a mother and a father – or at least that’s how it should be.”
Elton John has two sons born via IVF and last week vowed to boycott D&G’s luxury offerings because of the opinions expressed in the interview. "I call children of chemistry, synthetic children,” Dolce said. “Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalog."
Dolce & Gabbana appeared to be subtly promoting traditional families earlier this month while unveiling the brand’s new fall/winter collection in Milan. The show on March 1 “explored how the mother is the heart of the family.”
