/IPS BULLETIN OF RELIGIOUS AFFAIRS/ SPAIN: Will Love Conquer All In Same-Sex and Sibling Marriage Row?

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Apr 13 1997 (IPS) - Siblings Daniel and Rosa were separated as children and grew up in different orphanages. Eighteen years ago they met as strangers in a Madrid discotheque and fell in love, broke up when the truth came out, but could not stay apart.

They could not marry. Incest remains one of Spain’s strongest social taboos and the strongly Catholic Christian country does not yet fully recognise common law marriage. But they made a home together and Daniel, 43, and Rosa, 38, today have two children, aged 11 and five.

Their local authority in the small town of Cambre, in north west Spain, took pity on their plight and added their name to a special registry for all marital unions, including those between blood relatives or between more than two people.

But their simple aim — to take Daniel, Rosa and their two children out of a legal no-mans-land — has triggered a huge debate across the country.

And the debate is culminating in a serious look at the legal rights of people, be they siblings, same-sex couples or those whose religions permit polygamy, who commit to an exclusive relationship and want that commitment recognised by the state.

A bill tabled by the Spanish Workers’ Socialist Part and the United Left only narrowly failed to get through the national parliament on Mar 18, defeated by just two votes after two tied counts. But a new parliamentary debate is scheduled and hopes are high that it will eventually legalise these ‘unconventional’ unions.

A parliamentary commission is currently drafting a bill to cover these unions, hopefully to be presented to Parliament before the summer recess on Jun. 30. Regional parliaments in the Spanish Basque and Catalan countries and the Canary Islands will also shortly get a chance to state their own positions.

At local levels barriers are being broken down. In Madrid, gay partners Jose Antonio Alonso and Gregorio Peyus have registered as a couple under the state social security system, Peyus as Alonso’s spouse. Peyus is not in paid employment — “I’m the house husband,” he says — and is now eligible for all benefits legally accorded to spouses.

Pedro Gonzalez Zerolo, president of Madrid’s Gay and Lesbian Collective, says legislators have to listen to public opinion which has, in the words of United Left parliamentarian Presentacion Uran, “charted a leadership course for them”.

The socialist-led local authority in Cambre, population just 15,000, passed a local by-law granting legal recognition to ‘cohabiting groups’ allowing any group of persons living as an adult household and their children to receive the same state support accorded to ‘traditional’ families.

The by-law is also designed to cover the rights of any interdependent group, with or without children and regardless of sexual link — Cambre’s deputy mayor Augusto Rey Moreno, who tabled the bill, cites three widows who have set up house together in the town whose joint rights to their common home needed clarification.

Applicants, who must have been residents of Cambre at the last Spanish census, need only demonstrate cohabitation to be inscribed in the official municipal register and presented with a legal document to that effect.

“We are not interested in sexual orientation,” says Rey Moreno. “That’s a private matter.”

Not so, says the governing centre-right Popular Party and the Catholic Church, which vehemently oppose the changes.

The Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela Julian Barrio, whose diocese covers Cambre, has condemned the town’s decision as a challenge to the whole ethical, moral, juridical, social, educational and economic order in Spain.

In a lengthy oen letter to the Spanish people, the Archbishop observed that “full legalisation and normalisation of spouses’ rights for gay couples puts increasing distance between the State and the Christian conception of marriage”.

Archbishop Barrio warned that steps that denied the conventional Christian wedding its traditional significance constituted “social ruin” and urged legislators to “preserve the sense of beauty and value that have traditionally been associated with marriage”.

“Rather than providing validation for rights associated with sexual anarchy, it is crucial to foster stable traditional families,” he added.

Luis Zarraluqui, president of the Spanish Association of Family Lawyers, took an equally unsympathetic view and wondered what public reaction would be to seeing homosexual parents and their children on the streets. “Imagine,” he mused. “Two fathers, or two mothers, or a dad who is a woman, or a mum with moustache and beard. Poor kid…”

But Madrid psychology professor Fernando Chacon Fuertes says that the adoption of children by homosexual couples does not have a negative impact.

And homosexual parents, whether by blood or by adoption, need not influence the sexual orientation of their children. Otherwise, he asks, “how does one account for the fact that heterosexual parents produce homosexual children?”