Spain likely to pass bill legalizing gay marriage

Yoda

From The Philadelphia Inquirer 2004-10-02
Associated Press

MADRID, Spain - Despite vociferous opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, Spain's cabinet yesterday proposed legislation giving homosexuals the right to marry and adopt children.

Spain's parliament, the Congress of Deputies, was expected to approve the legislation promptly, making Spain the third nation to legalize same-sex marriage.

"This proposed law... removes a centuries-old barrier," Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar said at Moncloa, the prime minister's office and residence and site of the weekly cabinet meetings.

The legislation has been endorsed by the Socialist party, which ousted the conservative Popular Party in elections in March and which makes up the biggest bloc in the parliament.

"The United Left has shown from the first moment its total support" for the measure, parliamentary deputy Isaura Navarro said.

Gay advocacy groups were supportive of the measure.

"A child adopted by a homosexual couple is a child who is wanted, a child who is loved," and in no way worse off than a child adopted by a heterosexual couple, said Carlos Alberto Biendicho of the Popular Gay Platform.

The Catholic Church disagrees. Speaking for the Spanish Bishops Conference a few days ago, Juan Antonio Martinez Camino said that allowing gay marriages was like "imposing a virus" or "a counterfeit currency" into society.

If the legislation passes, Spain would join Belgium and the Netherlands in legalizing same-sex marriages.

Yoda

Catholic leaders call for people to take to the streets to protest against new laws

Giles Tremlett in Vilalba, north-west Spain
Saturday October 2, 2004
The Guardian

In his vicarage overlooking the beet fields and pastures that stretch past the Church of Santiago de Sancobad, Father Antonio Seijas had clear opinions on Spain's socialist government as it prepared yesterday to introduce gay marriage.

"This government is disgraceful, pornographic," said Father Seijas, a parish priest in this small, traditional country town in the north-western region of Galicia. "It is not just Catholic values that are being destroyed, but human ones."

The elderly Father Seijas, "Don Antonio" to his parishioners, is, however, increasingly alone in his beliefs, even in Vilalba, one of Spain's most conservative and Catholic areas.

Prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's socialist cabinet yesterday approved a draft law that will make Spain the third country in Europe, after Holland and Belgium, to have gay marriage.

"Our constitution guarantees the right to marriage ... We're going to extend that right to people who historically have been discriminated against: homosexuals," said the justice minister, Juan Fernando López Aguilar.

It was a sign that Spain is moving rapidly away from the church-established mores that ruled the countryside when Don Antonio was born here 75 years ago.

But it puts Mr Zapatero on a collision course with a Spanish church that is currently led by another son of Vilalba, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela. "We will end up with systematic destruction [of the family], of the basic cell of society," the cardinal warned in one of several broadsides against Mr Zapatero recently.

Mr Zapatero has been denounced as anti-religious, while a spokesman for the Spanish Bishop's Conference this week claimed that introducing gay marriage was like "imposing a virus on society".

Church authorities have even encouraged Spaniards to take to the streets to protest against this and other proposed measures, which include downgrading religious education in schools and easing restrictions on divorce and abortion.

Until recently these sentiments were echoed by the conservative People's party, which was ousted from power nationally in March elections but maintains control of Galicia's semi-autonomous government through the regional leader, Manuel Fraga.

Mr Fraga, a former minister in General Franco's dictatorship and founder of the People's party, is also from Vilalba. A bust of the 81-year-old veteran has stood in front of the town hall for the past 34 years.

In recent years Mr Fraga has labelled as "vandals" and "anarchists" those who want to introduce gay marriage or give rights to unmarried cohabiting couples. "Some are seeking to destroy the family," he warned during his last election campaign.

But the People's party, seeing a high general level of acceptance for gay marriage among Spaniards, has done a rapid U-turn. This week it announced that it backed a form of civil union for homosexual couples that would, however, exclude both the description "marriage" and the right to adopt children.

In Vilalba, the People's party deputy mayor, Gerardo Criado, claimed that, despite the town's conservative, Catholic reputation, few people would be scandalised if a gay couple here suddenly got married: "People may be traditional, but they are not necessarily that conservative. Different sexual expressions have always existed in the countryside and people have always known that."

Opinion polls, including one that shows gay marriage has wider acceptance in Spain than in traditionally liberal Sweden, indicate that is true for the rest of the country, too. Xosé Manuel Irimia, an opposition town councillor for the left-leaning Galician Nationalist Block agrees. "One thing is what the church tells people to do, and another is what people actually do," he said.

But it still proved impossible to find anyone in Vilalba who was openly gay. With a population of 15,000, its streets are dotted with granite crosses and signs pointing pilgrims along the Way of St James to nearby Santiago de Compostela.

"I know people who are gay here, but none of them have come out of the closet and that is a decision I have to respect, though it would make no difference to me if they did," said Mr Irimia.

To find a gay campaigner in these parts you have to migrate to the big cities. In Santiago de Compostela, Carlos Valcarcel, spokesman for a local gay activists' group, said: "This means a lot to us. For the first time we are being treated as equal citizens."

He, too, thought Spaniards would find homosexual marriage easy to accept. "It already seems to me that we are less apart from the rest of society than gays in countries like Britain," he said. "You don't find gay ghettoes here."

Mr Zapatero's upcoming raft of social legislation is the most obvious sign that he wants to bring change to Spain.

Withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, which he ordered immediately on taking office, has been a popular measure, with opinion polls showing wide backing. But opponents accuse Mr Zapatero of being little more than a winning smile with a be-nice-to-people attitude that will not stand the strains of being in power.

"That image is purely cosmetic and the laws he is bringing in are not, really, going to make that much difference to people," said Mr Criado.

That is certainly not how Spain's homosexuals were feeling yesterday. "I did not vote for Zapatero, but I believe in him and I will defend him," said Mr Valcarcel.

Yoda

By Katya Adler
BBC News correspondent in Madrid

The Spanish cabinet approved a bill on Friday allowing same-sex marriages.

If eventually endorsed by parliament - and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has promised it will be by early next year - Spain will become the third European country, after Belgium and the Netherlands, to pass such a far-reaching reform.

It is not simply a matter of legalising same-sex marriages, but of putting homosexual and heterosexual couples on an equal legal footing. This includes tax breaks, the right to a widower's pension, inheritance, divorce and alimony.

Most controversially, it also includes the right for gay couples to adopt children.

But the Spanish government brushes aside any suggestion that it is engineering a social revolution.

"Legalising gay marriages is simply logical," says First Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega.

"Around four million Spaniards are gay. That's about 10% of our population. Why shouldn't they have exactly the same rights as every other taxpayer?"

Granting the gay community the legal right to marry is not some whim this socialist administration dreamt up over its first summer in government.

"The Spanish Socialist Party stands for, and has always stood for, civil rights," insists Pedro Zerolo, a Socialist Party Deputy and the President of Spain's National Gay and Lesbian Federation.

"During our last eight years in opposition, we always said to Spaniards - Vote for us and vote for an inclusive government, for all Spaniards, with special attention to minorities.

"Gay marriage is just one small part of a whole range of social reforms that we're planning."

Indeed in the few months since they came to power, the Socialists have discussed: increasing state pensions and providing more housing for low-income families, but also liberalising Spain's abortion laws, the laws concerning embryo research, organising a national debate on euthanasia, introducing a fast-track divorce system and removing compulsory religious education from state schools.

For the Socialists and their supporters, this is all about recognising individual human rights and freedoms.

But their critics see it as a subversive social experiment and a vicious attack by a party with a long history of anti-clericalism.

And the Catholic Church is furious.

It has accused the Socialist government of pursuing an "aggressively secular" agenda and of threatening the institutions of marriage and family in Spain.

Earlier this week, the spokesman for the Catholic Bishops Conference, Juan Antonio Martinez Camino, likened legalising gay marriage to releasing a virus into Spanish society.

He said it was false, unnatural and an insult to heterosexual couples.

Yet the majority of Spaniards disagree. Even though most consider themselves to be Catholic and heterosexual.

Recent opinion polls show that around 65% of Spaniards are in favour of gay marriages.

"It's quite simple," says Jesus Bastante, the lead Religious Affairs writer at ABC newspaper.

"Spaniards regard Catholicism as part of their national heritage. Most Spanish children are baptised, but later in life they favour traditions over the religion itself. In the end, we Spaniards are far more liberal-minded than our Church."

But not that liberal-minded, according to Ursula Moreno, of El Mundo newspaper.

"Yes, Spaniards think same-sex couples should have the right to live and love and marry, but what the opinion polls don't show is that Spaniards worry about the details of the new proposed law.

"I think there'll be a huge national debate about whether or not gays and lesbians should be able to adopt children. I don't think Spain is ready," she says.

All that will become clear from the public and media reaction here as the gay marriage bill arrives in the Spanish parliament for debate.

In the past, Spaniards have shown their capacity and appetite for swift and dramatic social change.

During the 1980s Madrid suddenly became intoxicated by a cultural revolution after 40 years of military dictatorship in Spain.

Under the dictator Francisco Franco, homosexuality was illegal and a woman was regarded as the legal property of her husband.

Much has changed here since then. And if the Socialist government gets its way, there are a lot more changes to come.

Spain is fast becoming the Sweden of the Mediterranean.

ferdi

Yoda wrote:

Catholic leaders call for people to take to the streets to protest against new laws

:rolleyes:

Guy:Incognito

im all for gay marriages. thng is tho im more anti church than pro gay rights(probably cos im a bit lazy towards things that dont directly affect me) so i reckon id vote/fight for these kinds of law changes just to stick one to the church.

damien

Stekelly wrote:

im all for gay marriages. thng is tho im more anti church than pro gay rights

But it's not gay rights, it's equal rights. I think that's what needs to be promoted more.

OfflerCrocGod

Yoda wrote:

"This government is disgraceful, pornographic," said Father Seijas, a parish priest in this small, traditional country town in the north-western region of Galicia. "It is not just Catholic values that are being destroyed, but human ones."

Urge to kill rising.....

Stark

Ah Christian love, where would the world be without it?