By Tito Drago
MADRID, Oct 22 2003 (IPS)

The push for the legalisation of same-sex marriage received a strong show of political and social support Wednesday in Spain when three homosexual couples applied for marriage licences.

The push for the legalisation of same-sex marriage received a strong show of political and social support Wednesday in Spain when three homosexual couples applied for marriage licences.

The spokespersons in Madrid for the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and United Left (IU), Trinidad Jiménez and Inés Sabanés, accompanied Pedro Zerolo and Jesús Santos, as well as Beatriz Gimeno and Boti Rodrigo – a gay and lesbian couple, respectively – as they signed up at the civil register.

In the eastern city of Valencia on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, Miquel Angel Fernández and Antonio Poveda, the secretaries of two local homosexual rights groups, the Federation of Lesbians, Gays and Transsexuals and the Collectiu Lambda, also registered for a licence.

The judges who received the applications now have 10 days to decide whether to accept them, after conferring with prosecutors.

So far, all applications put in by homosexual couples in Spain wishing to marry have been turned down.

But the two gay couples and the lesbian couple who registered Wednesday said they would push their cases ”to the very limit” in their fight for recognition of their right to marry.

Zerolo is a PSOE town councillor in the Madrid city government, Santos is a designer, Rodrigo heads an organisation of lesbians and gays and is a public employee in the civil register, and Gimeno is president of the State Federation of Lesbians and Gays.

The constitution states that ”a man and a woman have the right to marry, with full equality before the law.”

One of the judges who has denied that right to same-sex couples, Judge Julia Novellas, argued that ”it is so obvious that marriage is comprised of a man and a woman that the legislators did not consider it necessary to clarify it in the written law.”

But professor of constitutional law Javier Pérez Royo maintained that the constitution recognises the right of men and women to marry ”without specifying that the marriage must be heterosexual.”

The constitution also explicitly prohibits discrimination ”on the basis of any sexual or social circumstance,” he added.

Spain’s leftist and centre-left parties, as well as homosexual rights organisations, expressed their strong, open support for the couples who registered for a marriage licence Wednesday.

The governing, centre-left Popular Party (PP) and the Catholic Church, meanwhile, expressed their open rejection of same-sex marriage.

Critics maintain that marriage is an institution that by definition consists of a man and a woman.

The director of the Secretariat of Family and Life of Spain’s Roman Catholic bishops’ conference, Inocente García de Andrés, described as an ”opportunistic” gesture the decision by Jiménez and Sabanés to accompany the couples, which he attributed to the fact that Madrid is in the midst of an election campaign.

Same-sex couples ”can love each other very much and even live together,” but ”they must not be put on the same level as families or marriages,” said García de Andrés.

In his view, ”they cannot form families or marriages because they lack sexual complementariness and the transmission of life,” and ”the only definition of family that exists” is the one accepted by ”the Catholic Church and the Royal Academy dictionary.”

Couples like the ones who registered to marry Wednesday ”are only trying to reproduce forms of families in which the word ‘family’ is in quotation marks, without caring about the real definition of family, and without the ability to bring children into the world between themselves,” García de Andrés added.

Two women who identified themselves as Pepa and Victoria told IPS that they have a two-year-old son, who was born to Pepa through artificial insemination.

Besides living together and raising him as a couple, they would like to be able to register him as their son, with both of them appearing as his legal parents. But that would depend on the fate of the new interpretation of the constitution which the three couples in Madrid and Valencia pushed for Wednesday.

In the Basque Country and Navarra in northern Spain, two of the 17 autonomous communities into which the country is divided, civil unions or domestic partnerships can legally adopt children, although the PP has challenged the regional laws before the Constitutional Court, which has not yet ruled on the question.

In the rest of the country, domestic partnerships can register as such in the census carried out by city governments, but that does not entail recognition of their civil union or enable them to adopt children.

Excerpt:

By Tito Drago
MADRID, Oct 22 2003 (IPS)

The push for the legalisation of same-sex marriage received a strong show of political and social support Wednesday in Spain when three homosexual couples applied for a marriage licence.

The spokespersons in Madrid for the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and United Left (IU), Trinidad Jiménez and Inés Sabanés, accompanied Pedro Zerolo and Jesús Santos, as well as Beatriz Gimeno and Boti Rodrigo – a gay and lesbian couple, respectively – as they signed up at the civil register.

In the eastern city of Valencia on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, Miquel Angel Fernández and Antonio Poveda, the secretaries of two local homosexual rights groups, the Federation of Lesbians, Gays and Transsexuals and the Collectiu Lambda, also registered for a licence.

The judges who received the applications now have 10 days to decide whether to accept them, after conferring with prosecutors.

So far, all applications put in by homosexual couples in Spain wishing to marry have been turned down.

But the two gay couples and the lesbian couple who registered Wednesday said they would push their cases ”to the very limit” in their fight for recognition of their right to marry.

Zerolo is a PSOE town councillor in the Madrid city government, Santos is a designer, Rodrigo heads an organisation of lesbians and gays and is a public employee in the civil register, and Gimeno is president of the State Federation of Lesbians and Gays.

The constitution states that ”a man and a woman have the right to marry, with full equality before the law.”

One of the judges who has denied that right to same-sex couples, Judge Julia Novellas, argued that ”it is so obvious that marriage is comprised of a man and a woman that the legislators did not consider it necessary to clarify it in the written law.”

But professor of constitutional law Javier Pérez Royo maintained that the constitution recognises the right of men and women to marry ”without specifying that the marriage must be heterosexual.”

The constitution also explicitly prohibits discrimination ”on the basis of any sexual or social circumstance,” he added.

Spain’s leftist and centre-left parties, as well as homosexual rights organisations, expressed their strong, open support for the couples who registered for a marriage licence Wednesday.

The governing, centre-left Popular Party (PP) and the Catholic Church, meanwhile, expressed their open rejection of same-sex marriage.

Critics maintain that marriage is an institution that by definition consists of a man and a woman.

The director of the Secretariat of Family and Life of Spain’s Roman Catholic bishops’ conference, Inocente García de Andrés, described as an ”opportunistic” gesture the decision by Jiménez and Sabanés to accompany the couples, which he attributed to the fact that Madrid is in the midst of an election campaign.

Same-sex couples ”can love each other very much and even live together,” but ”they must not be put on the same level as families or marriages,” said García de Andrés.

In his view, ”they cannot form families or marriages because they lack sexual complementariness and the transmission of life,” and ”the only definition of family that exists” is the one accepted by ”the Catholic Church and the Royal Academy dictionary.”

Couples like the ones who registered to marry Wednesday ”are only trying to reproduce forms of families in which the word ‘family’ is in quotation marks, without caring about the real definition of family, and without the ability to bring children into the world between themselves,” García de Andrés added.

Two women who identified themselves as Pepa and Victoria told IPS that they have a two-year-old son, who was born to Pepa through artificial insemination.

Besides living together and raising him as a couple, they would like to be able to register him as their son, with both of them appearing as his legal parents. But that would depend on the fate of the new interpretation of the constitution which the three couples in Madrid and Valencia pushed for Wednesday.

In the Basque Country and Navarra in northern Spain, two of the 17 autonomous communities into which the country is divided, civil unions or domestic partnerships can legally adopt children, although the PP has challenged the regional laws before the Constitutional Court, which has not yet ruled on the question.

In the rest of the country, domestic partnerships can register as such in the census carried out by city governments, but that does not entail recognition of their civil union or enable them to adopt children.

Excerpt: