[From the diaries by susanbhu] After the withdrawal of troops from the endless blood-filled quagmire of Iraq and the revolutionary appointment of a cabinet with an equal proportion of men and women in one of the most chauvinistic societies in the world, the goverment of José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Spain has received approval from the parliament for a law allowing homosexual marriages and adoption in defiance of the Catholic Church and the new Pope’s explicit opposition.
From BBC World News online:
The bill gives same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples, including the right to adopt children.
The Roman Catholic Church and conservative opposition have fiercely opposed the move, which opinion polls suggest has the public’s support.
In fact, according to Il Manifesto of Italy:
But Zapatero doesn’t seem particularly impressed by the new Pope’s affermations:
From the BBC article:
I’m not so sure this is accurate. According to Il Manifesto, this law would put Madrid in the avant-garde of the world on the issue of homosexual rights. Only Holland, Belgium and parts of Canada (not an EU member)
permit gay marriages as of now.
The more important point,however, is that this is happening in a nation where, not that long ago, under Franco’s dictatorship about 5,000 people were incarcerated on the basis of their sexual orienation. So, this is a fairly great day indeed for those who believe that homosexual rights are fundamentally human rights.
Cabinet spokeswoman Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said thousands of children lived with homosexual parents and numerous studies had shown that they were no different to children brought up in heterosexual homes.
“There is no proof that homosexual parents educate their children any worse. In adoption, the well-being of the children comes first, independent of the sexual orientation of the parents,” she said.
The Christian Association of Gays and Lesbians welcomed the cabinet’s decision.
Gwenael Le Moing, of the association, said that the law would help the normalisation of homosexuality in society – “although there was still a lot of work to do”.
“It also leaves the church more and more isolated in its discriminatory position.”
The adoption part of the bill will allow gay couples to adopt only Spanish children, to avoid any legal wrangles with other countries. Under the bill, married gay couples will also be entitled to draw a pension after a partner’s death and to divorce.
Church leaders had earlier compared the plans to releasing a virus into society and called on politicians to reject them.
Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took office in April, intending to remove what he called the Church’s undeniable advantages and create a secular state with streamlined divorce and relaxations in abortion law.
Earlier this week he said: “I deeply respect the opinions of the Catholic Church even if they are very critical of the government. I ask them to show the same respect.”
The Church’s influence on Spaniards has declined precipitously since the death in 1975 of the dictator General Francisco Franco. His regime was closely linked to the Church.
Opinion polls suggest that nearly half of Spaniards now almost never go to mass.
this guy has balls…we need one somone like him in Italy.
Forget about the US!!
Yup, it’d be too much to hope for in the U.S.! Very nice diary … do you have the links to the stories? E-mail them to me and I’ll put them in the diary. susanhuatearthlink.net
No, that’s no problem I can go back and out the links in myslef…just a little carelessness.
How’s the “German Sheperd” going to deal with this? Oh MYYYYY…..
Hoho!!! If SusanH liked it, there must be something good in it, I say…
Gilgamesh, you gave us a wonderfully succinct depiction of the political flavors on Spain’s plate.
It just blows me away that a place like Spain can go from Francoist theocracy to this in just a few decades while the Land of the Free is still mired in its giant sea of faith-based bullshit. It’s time for all our “patriots” to start to worry about how the rest of the world is passing us by. Don’t look now, but we’re well on our way to being the stagnant, dying swamp of the world.
It felt absolutely dumbfounded when I first glanced at the artcile about this in Il Manifesto this morning.
My first thought was “this guy’s just the most extraordinary, non-violent revolutionary political leader in the last thirty or fourty years.”
But after having read a little deeper into the artcile, I discovered the real secret: 66% of the Spanish people support gay marriages and adoption, according to recent polls. It’s a society, apparently, undergoing an tremendously acceleretaed process (hopefeully irreversibe) of secularization and anti-clericalism.
All is not doom and gloom in this for the US, though. One plausible explanation for these changes in attitued might be precisly the fact that the Spaniards had to endure such a long period of political repression and constant religious intervention in ordinary life. Hopefully, the same thing will eventually happen with the Republicnas and their association with the fundamentalist right. That is, people will just get fed up and trun against.
Look to this as an example, I think, and not as an excuse or a justification to despair about the future of the US.
Let’s hope it spreads like wildfire 😉
Exactly!!
Another thing Spain is successful at—-they have caught and are bringing Al-Queda terrorists to trial.
Like the U.S. used to do, and did with the 1993 WTC bombing and the embassy bombings.
But now … great point, Miss Devore! Nice to see you!
Their was another article about just that today.
But you hit on an important point.
Tom Englehart, of Tomdispatch, wrote an excellent article a while back which contained data (I don’t remember the source) showing that the overwhelming majority of REAL members of al-Qaeda and other terrosist groups who were being captured and prosectued were not being captured in US military raids and operations but by local police forces using what puppet-master Cheney disdainfully refers to as “the enfoement approach to the GWOT.”
Um…yeah…seems to work pretty well actually…
But I have to get off-line..
If there are any more comments for me, I’ll try to respond tomorrow.
That it comes not from one leader, but from a popular concensus is what I find so astonishing. Francoism was a very popular thing in its day, not so long ago, and now the nation has moved on to a more rational and empathetic outlook. Meanwhile, the US is still battling to get past the 80-year-old Scopes trial. I don’t share your optimism. My hope lies with the world outside our little bubble of ignorance.
I don’t pretend to understand the fundmantal resons for the US’s truly profound cultural conservatism. That it is indeed a genuine “cultural” phenomenon, though, is clear from public opinion polls on question running the gamut from dealth-penalty, gun-control, gay marriages and adoption, ambiguity on abortion and reproductive rights of women to hatred of taxes and governement intervention for even the most benevolent of motives.
Another,more disturbing way to look at this is that things may have to get worse before they get better. Perhaps Americans will have to experince first-hand and for a substantial period of time what it would really be like to have to live under a francoist-style one-party quasi-theocratic governement before they can understand how horrible it really is..
At this point I’ve come to believe that our best hope is to give up on “one nation” and devolve into either two or more separate nations or an extreme, region-based federalism. The winnowing and sifting of opinion is a great thing, but endless debate between science and reason vs “faith-based” idiocy produces nothing but stagnation. It’s time to figure out how to let America’s regions reap what they sow.
But that’s a whole different issue.
I’ve often wondered (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) if the outcome of the US civial war shouldn’t be considered a loss for the North with the unification. (0:…
I know, I know, it’s a bit more complicated than that. But the whole conseravive revolutuon dis start with the “southern stategy” and it is still the traditionalist, fundmantalist stronghold par eccelence…
To me, with no tongue in cheek, it’s obvious that if the Confederacy went its own way the rest of us would on our way to a damn nice county, one that once again might deserve to be the leader of the “free world”. 80 years of the Snopes trial, of arguing simple realities with idiots, is more than enough. “One nation” is just a sentimental delusion that we can no longer afford.
Old honest Abe has been criticized for many things, but you don’t hear much about the possibility that he might actually have been wrong in his insistence that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Or, rather, in his interventionist solution to the problem. If a house divided against itslef cannot stand,why not break it up into two or more seperate houses??
It was, after all, Lincoln who ordered the first shot to be fired which provoked that whole extraordinarily bloody conflict in the name of a forcible reunification of two profoundlt contasting cultures. And, as we all know, he didn’t do it to aboish slavery or even ameliorate it, but for economic and other considerations.
Was it worth it? Perhaps so. But even the simple posing of the question represents, in most peeopl’e minds, a sort of violation of one of the sacred shibolleths of American civilization. Hoever, looking back over the history of the hassles and headaches that the reactionary south has imposed on the rest of the counrtry since that time, you certainly begin to doubt.
I think debating whether Lincoln was right or wrong is a distraction. He made what seemed to him the best choice based on the circumstances at the time. Maybe the US could not have survived independently if it was divided then.
We don’t argue that the writers of the Constitution were “wrong” about slavery, about suffrage, about statehood, about representation, etc. We just amend the Constitution to reflect subsequent real-world change. Those amendments and the laws the depend on them do not constitute an attack on Jefferson or Franklin, that the Constitution was “mistaken”.
The question now is whether “one nation” ideology serves the best interests of Americans today. I think it deserves serious and open attention. We have reached a point of stagnation where nothing can be changed, where reason and political imagination are both stifled in the ongoing, century-old, war over the Snopes trial.
It seems to me worth thinking about whether the stalemate that keeps one part of the country from regaining its place among the civilized world while it frustrates the theocratic obsessions of another part does nothing but send us all into terminal deterioration. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
No,in all seriousness.
I don’t think it’s as simple as that. After all,the red-state, blue-state divide is just a convenient media-generated electoral abstraction. There ar many “red” people in the rural parts of Massachusits or New york State and, viceveersa, there are many “blue” voters in the most conservative states. Noot to mention the states like Ohio where the mix could go one way or the other from one election to the next. So I don’t see how secession or separation could be a serious practical possibility in such circumstances.
The influence of Christian fundmantlism, in paricualar, is very stron in the central states (north and south) so I don’t see how any meaningful division cold be made on that basis either.
Just look at any recent electoral map. Not to see any correspondence between the culture war divisions and US geography is just denial.
The aim is not to create some utopia where only liberals/Dems/rationalists need apply. The aim is to break the stalemate that condemns us to endless futile culture war over nonsense. The Scopes trial has been going on for 80 years. In the meantime, the US falls further and further from fulfilling its own supposed ideals and even of keeping up with the rest of the developed world.
I’ll refrain from geographical speculations because the final map is far down the road. The first step is the answer to a simple question: is there some value in insisting on “one nation” that overwhelms the value of freeing ourselves to pursue other goals, like a civilized healthcare system, economic justice, individual liberties, and an end to extreme poverty?
You know my answer. I’d be interested in hearing yours.