Edward, you forget one important category here, namely gay or lesbian couples where one of the partners already has children – either from a previous heterosexual relationship or in any other way. In most countries, including, to this day, the Netherlands and Belgium, it is extremely difficult, or even impossible, for the other partner to obtain parenthood over the child – including the rights *and* obligations that come with it. Should something happen to the biological parent, the remaining partner and the child have no legal right whatsoever to continue as a family.

So, family values? With all their moral talk, Opus Dei and their supporters just obstruct family values and favour tearing families apart. Hypocritical bigots…

(Those who read Dutch could visit this website of a Belgian campaign in favour of gay adoption rights)

Peter, I don’t know if you’re still around at this stage, but I think it is important to stress that in European Law generally it is the interest of the child that is paramount, so any concerns about obstacles and ‘role confusions’ would be argued out in that context. This is about a coherent framework of law, and gay adopters, just like hetero ones would have to meet the normal criteria of parenthood.

You’re not surely suggesting that if Elton John or Pedro Amodovar (to name but two) adopted a child, that this child would be only be faced with extra obstacles.

Those who can read Spanish may find this interesting on the departure of Fraga, and its potential impact on the PP. It was Fraga who accepted the outcome of the elections, renounced Trillo’s attempts to challenge the vote, and saved Galicia and Spanish politics from the ‘Florida turn’. With Fraga gone, and an ‘illuminated’ Aznar orchestrating in the backround anything, literally anything, can happen next inside the PP.

I’m no legal eagle (I’m sure Mrs T will do this better than I can) but I assume that it is the same as the relation between states in the US: the union would not be recognised in law where there is no provision so doing. European law is not harmonised. Even law relating to economic activity is far from uniform. Clearly with issues like this what happens in one nation state may influence events in another in the future but that is all.

This may complicate issues like holding property jointly in another member state with strict inheritance rules.

On another issue, the PP and Franco, the issue is complicated. I fully accept that Mrs T is saying post-Francoist, not Francoist. I wouldn’t go down that road personally.

There are a number of important issues here. Perhaps the appropriate starting point would be a dispute which surrounded the British Labour Party in the 1980′s concerning the organised participation of the Trotskyist ‘militant tendency’ and entrism. The extreme right in Spain does effectively practice entrism in the PP, as does opus dei. Really there are two parties there. The important issue is whether the forcing of a split in the PP would be in the interests of democracy. What you could have is a Le Pen type party with some significant support in the ‘deep interior’ of Spain. There would also be a difficulty about having a credible opposition party with the PP rump that would be left. I’m not sure this is really in anyone’s interest. It may be better to leave the work of containing these people to the inner machinery of the PP itself.

I think I am right in saying that the principle architect of this arrangement – of fusing together a right party that would have serious democratic possibilities of government – was Manuel Fraga, the guy who just lost the elections in Galicia. I know I keep mentioning these elections, but I think they are deeply significant. Galicia is one of the most traditional and conservative areas of Spain. Voting took place on the day of the big anti gay marriage demonstration in Madrid, yet the people of Galicia voted against the PP. They did not oppose gay marriage in the way that eg US voters did in some traditional areas by voting for Bush. I think this is fantastic (and please note I am *not* a PSOE supporter, not at all).

Spain is a Parliamentary democracy, some people in the PP are inclined to forget that sometimes with their discovery of the attractions of extra parliamentary activity (probably it is the entrists who are pushing all this). The case of gay marriage is not the case of the Iraq war, although I suspect a lot of the PP strategy is an attempt to play tit-for-tat on this.

Now a word about Aznar. Personally I can’t stand the man, but…..

I would point out one speech which for me was very important. This was the one delivered in a press conference on the morning of 11 March 2004. At that time Aznar (and I myself) believed the bombing had been the work of ETA. Given the scale of the tragedy you could have expected anything, but what Aznar gave was not a rant, but a reasoned plea to continue to fight ‘the terrorist band’ within the bounds of democracy. Not to let the terrorists put our democracy at risk. And rhetoric and reality have been, more or less, in harmony here.

So what I am saying, is that Aznar, much as I dislike him, was not a secret Francoist, but someone who believed in democracy and the rule of law, and in a way it was he who carried the PP successfully from the post-francoist origins (there are photos of Aznar himself wearing the blue shirt as a young man) to the more modern party it is today.

Since losing the vote on March 14 things have changed. I think he took the whole thing personally, and that the turn of events unhinged that fragile grip that reason had ever exerted on his mind. (And I think there are shades of what happened to another Mrs T here, Mrs T).

I should never dream of mocking a non-native speaker’s little mistakes of English usage (and your English, though it could be improved a bit, is more than sufficient to communicate your ideas).

It’s those ideas that are the problem.

I’ll start with a small point. My remark about not being a social worker and hence unqualified to comment was a nose-thumbing at Peter Sierra’s comment above. The irony might have gone missing as you mentally translated into Spanish.

On your first substantive complaint, note carefully the prefix ‘post-’ that comes before ‘Francoist’ in my description of the PP. I would never accuse PP, as a party, of being anti-democratic. And I am well aware that (as Edward points out above) there is more than one stream of thought within the party. Nevertheless, PP has roots; and those roots are hardly in the soil of the Republic. And, to the extent that old franquistas sought a political home in a contemporary mainstream party, that party is likelier to be PP than PSOE, wouldn’t you say? When I first visited Spain, the Generalissimo had already departed to his eternal reward; but only fairly recently. A good many of the acquaintances I made were hangers-on of the Fuerza Nueva, whose sympathies for Franco were rather more clear-cut; a good many of those acquaintances are now in PP. You’d be correct to chide me if I had labelled PP Francoist rather than post-Francoist; but I did not.

I’d agree with you that PP are conservative. It’s a rather odd ‘libertarian’ party, though, that would oppose gay marriage.

And as for that:

calling “marriage” the union between two men or two wimen (or one man and six wimen, or a whole village alltogether) is just nonsense.

Calling any of those things ‘marriage’ is nonsense if the laws of the land define marriage solely as between one man and one woman. And, if we are talking about marriage as a civil institution of the state, that is the only basis on which they are nonsensical. Islamic law allows a man up to four wives. Marriage between a man and four women is hardly nonsense in an Islamic state. Netherlands, Belgian and now Spanish law have ceased to define marriage as between one man and one woman. In those countries, two men or two women exchanging vows before a registry offical is no longer nonsense; it is a marriage.

It might be that you do not like this new definition, or even that you think it gravely wrong. But your dislikes and thoughts do not make these marriages a nonsense; the law once made them a nonsense, and has now ceased to do so.

Now, the RC church and some other denominations dislike same-sex marriage. Indeed, they may think that such a thing, by definition, cannot be a ‘marriage’. In the context of their own religious teachings, they may define marriage anyway they like, and if they like to describe it as solely between two persons of opposite sex, then (by these religious standrs) a gay marriage is no marriage at all, even if the state says that it is. And that’s fine. The state defines what marriage means for purposes of state law; the church defines what marriage means in the eyes of its God. A problem arises only when the church attempts to force its definition into the state’s laws. (Or vice versa; but that is not what is happening in the case of Spain.)

So, please, don’t you give us the “Enhorabuena”: it is not a happy day for common sense and legality in Spain today.

Whether or not you agree, it is indeed a happy day for common sense and legality, not to mention liberty and justice, in Spain. Sure, there are Spaniards who begrudge a minority of their countrymen enjoying the same rights and freedoms as the majority. It’s sad they feel this way. But a hearty ‘?Enhorabuena!’ is nevertheless very much in order for the country as a whole for leaving that sort of Spaniard behind.

This isn’t an issue. Welcome anyway, or bienvenida.

“ignorance of the Spanish situation”.

This wouldn’t be my case, I have lived in Barcelona for years, and more or less think of myself as Britanico-Catalan these days.

Now what you say about the PP is, in part true. People like Ruiz Galardon, Piqu?, even probably Rajoy are modern, reasonably moderate, interested in reforming and building a ‘deregulated’ Spain. I have a fair amount of respect for these politicians. But then there is the other part, Esperanza Aquirre (goddess of wrath) and Angel Acebes, and Trillo (who is still being persued by the families of the victims of the military air crash whose bodies he couldn’t be bothered to have identified correctly before burying them any old how). And of course Aznar’s wife. This group are more or less a sect (as I said, opus is there somewhere). So sect-like are they that they continue to claim that Eta was in some significant way implicated in 11 March.

Far from being modern this group is deeply bigotted. They are violently anti-Catalan for a start, and don’t even want to let us have back a load of documents stored in Salamanca which were carried off by the Franco administration as ‘war booty’. They are so crazy they even organised a demonstration about this in Salamanca a few weeks back. They are fiercely nationalist and oppose tooth and nail Zapatero’s attempts to build a modern pluri-national Spanish state. So unreformed Franco people they aren’t, deeply disturbing they are.