Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 71

Out of FocHS'on the Family
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Kathleen Ferrier, a spokeswoman for the largest Dutch
conservative party, the Christian Democrats.
—AP, July 31, 2003
As of November 2004, the supreme courts in Ontario, Quebec, British
Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and the Yukon Territory have
cleared the way for state-sanctioned same-sex marriage. The Newfoundland
government said it would not oppose efforts by two couples to overturn the
province’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Immediately after taking office in April 2004, Spam’s Prime Minister
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero vowed to allow gay marriage and fight
discrimination. In late June 2004, Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar
confirmed that pledge after Spanish lawmakers approved a resolution urging the
government to amend Spain’s civil code to permit gay marriage. The Spanish
people agreed. Agence France-Presse reported on July 12, 2004, that a June poll
conducted by The Centre for Sociological Investigations showed 66.2% of a
random sample of 2,400 people said they felt gay and lesbian couples should be
allowed to marry, and three-quarters of those polled said that where children are
concerned, the overriding factor is the good of the individual child regardless of
its guardians’ sexual orientation. The poll also showed the Catholic Church to be
steadily losing influence as it retreats further and further into dogma seen as
incompatible with contemporary social needs and cultural realities
(www.aQj.com).
Not surprisingly, the Catholic Church—which enjoyed close ties with
and special privileges under Gen. Francisco Franco’s right-wing regime—has
lashed out against the new Spanish government. On September 27, 2004, Juan
Antonio Martinez Camino, spokesman for the Spanish Bishops Conference, said
the church had nothing against gays and lesbians, but felt a union of two people
of the same sex is simply not a marriage. Allowing it would create “a counterfeit
currency in the body of society,” Martinez Camino claimed in an interview on
Spanish National Television. Such legislation, he said, was like “imposing a
virus on society, something false that will have negative consequences for social
life.” To say the Catholic Church has nothing against gays and lesbians is
untrue. The Church has been actively campaigning against homosexuals for
decades while covering up its own internal pedophilia sex scandal. Perhaps the
church’s unrelenting, often hypocritical and usually demeaning attacks on gay
people—which have become more numerous and more vicious in the last few
years—are part of the reason so many Spaniards and other nationals are turning
their backs on the divisive Church.
While attending the 48th International Eucharistic Congress in
Guadalajara, Mexico (October 2004), Javier Lozano Barragan, a prominent
Mexican cardinal, denounced same-sex marriages and likened homosexual