Same-sex marriage: The Spanish experience

As MP’s in Westminster gather tomorrow to vote ‘in conscience’ on David Cameron’s gay marriage bill, let me share with them and all those interested in the subject, the experience of Spain as I have reported in this week’s Catholic weekly The Tablet.

From record youth unemployment to an increasingly volatile political debate on the future of Catalonia, there is no lack of gathering storms in Spain. And yet the issue of same sex-marriage is not one that is provoking floods of outrage these days. Spanish parliamentarians are not facing an intense lobby by religious groups, as in England and Wales. Nor are the streets of Madrid filling up with protestors, as in Paris.

In fairness, the Spanish Episcopal Conference has not gone totally silent on the issue. In the run-up to Christmas the bishops described the Spanish legislation allowing marriage between gays as “gravely unjust” for failing to recognise specifically the rights of husband and wife, or those of children to enjoy parents of different sex as the “heart of a stable family.”

The statement came days after Spain’s Constitutional  Court ratified the same sex marriage legislation-in fact a broadening of the civil code-which was approved by a majority of the Spanish parliament in July 2005 following the latest post-Franco equal rights initiative of the then newly elected socialist government led by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

Back in 2005, opinion polls at the time showed that close to seventy per cent of Spaniards supported the rights to get married if they so wished. The Socialist government for its part resisted stirring the pot and held back from making any suggestion of an ‘opt-in’ or opt-out’ clause for religious groups. Nonetheless, debate around its drafting initially proved divisive nonetheless, with the then opposition party the centre right Partido Popular challenging it through the courts, and in an alliance with bishops and priests, organising mass demonstrations up and down the country on a point of religious principle.

“The new law had the (Spanish) Bishops Conference as one of its biggest opponents, with the support of Rome which feared that Spain would become the stepping stone for similar legislation in Latin America and other traditionally Catholic countries in Europe,” recalls Juan Antonio Rubio, Editor of the Spanish catholic weekly Vida Nueva.

The Vatican’s fears were not entirely without foundation. When the law was passed, Spain was only the third country in the world to allow same-sex couples marry, after the Netherlands and Belgium. Since 2005, an increasing number of countries have followed in Spain’s footsteps, including Portugal and Argentina, while other countries with sizeable Catholic populations like Brazil, Mexico and the US have allowed some gay marriages to be performed in certain states.

In Spain, however the power of the Church to sway opinion on this issue is today limited, not least because at a time of unprecedented and unresolved economic crisis, the current PP government does not have the political will to fight another battle over a war it believes is over.  The ruling PP has declared officially through its minister of Justice, former mayor of Madrid, and rising political star Alberto Ruiz Gallardon that it will accept the decision of the Constitutional Court despite another members of the cabinet, the minister of the interior Jorge Fernandez Diaz –with close links to Opus Dei-declaring their unwavering belief that marriage should only be between man and a woman.

Other critics include Andrea Hermida,a member of a PP Youth Association, tweeted that gays needed to be “cured”, while Luis Alfonso de Borbon and Duke of Anjou, Franco’s grandson and one of the current pretenders  to the defunct French throne , stated that “marriage between a  man and woman is a question if civilization. “

Nonetheless more extreme statements against gay rights generally have recently been limited to a handful of priests and bishops, and other throw-backs to some of the more extreme anti-liberal attitudes prevalent after the Spanish Civil War.

Nor has there been a repeat of the mass anti-gay demonstration that took place in Madrid in June 2005. “There is a de facto non-aggression pact on this issue between the PP government and the Church. The Bishops have toned down their calls to have the law repealed, while the PP has officially stated that it no longer has any intention of scrapping it. The Church is focusing on other issues where it is on stronger (political) ground,” says Vida Nueva’s Fr Rubio.

Apart from a pledge to fix the economic and financial mess inherited from the socialists, the PP government was elected with a mandate to roll back two key ‘social reforms’ in particular-those liberalizing abortion rights, and, separately,  those diluting the Catholic Church’s influence and power in state and private education..

While the ruling PP has remained united on abortion and education issues, it has struggled within itself over the issue of gay rights, not least because the party includes no small number of gays within its own ranks who have long been in favor of gay civil partnerships having the same equal rights as heterosexual couples but without calling it a marriage.

According to Walter Oppenheimer, London correspondent of El Pais, such political pragmatism contrasts with the “political and religious shambles” that David Cameron has made of the Coalition government’s equal marriage bill :  “In Spain, because of the legacy of Franco, the issue of same sex marriage was framed in terms of a broad commitment to equal rights… So most Spaniards don’t see it as an issue of religion but part of a modern, democratic society that was long denied to them by Franco.”

Even during Franco’s time, as Giles Tremlett points out in his book Ghosts of Spain, “an underlying seam of social tolerance appeared to co-exist with the regime’s homophobic rantings”  and prosecutions.  Aristocratic and pro-regime gays were allowed to carry on pretty much as normal, short of openly flouting the sexual act, with the picturesque Catalan resort of Sitges-home to artists and writers- leading the way in the counter-culture of the 1960’s with its toleration of a small number of gay cafes and bars.

Many Spanish men and women remain highly tolerant of the sexual choices of others. According to the Spanish National Statistics Office, since the 2005 reform – and up the end of 2011 (last full year for which reliable official stats on this issue are available) there have been just over 20, 784 gay marriage ceremonies  across Spain all of them taking place in  local authority offices and cultural centres. One of the most recent was held last December in the small village of Jun (population 3,500), near Granada, between the South Australian Social inclusion minister Ian Hunter and his partner of  22 years Leith Semmens. The widely publicized marriage ceremony took place in the village arts centre and was presided over by its socialist mayor.

There have been cases of Spanish priests discreetly celebrating mass for gay couples, and I know of one priest who had gone as far as blessing a marriage. And while it is true that no bishop has given his authorization to a religious gay marriage , there is little evidence that Spanish gays- or politicians for that matter- are pushing the agenda by demanding to be married in the full-rights of the Catholic church or any other religious denomination.