I’m wondering why news that Spain has legalized gay marriage hasn’t gotten more play here. Or even abroad; the Guardian hasn’t had too much coverage and even the normally on-top-of-it Fistful of Euros is silent.
Yes, the law faces a legal challenge and some opposition from conservatives even if, as the Economist notes (subsc. required), the center-right seems to oppose simply the term matrimonio rather than an equal legal arrangement. But whatever the eventual outcome, the implications are big. After all, Spain is just the third European country, after Netherlands and Belgium to legalize gay marriage (others, like the Scandanavian countries and France, have varying parity of civil unions). And it’s a Southern European nation that until recently (OK, now) wouldn’t have been anyone’s bet for the next country to recognize full gay equality. We have the legacy of Franco and the smaller tactical mistakes of the center-right to thank for that, of course, but we also are seeing benefits of development across the Euro zone as economic and monetary integration has breathed new life into the former periphery. (We’ve seen similar tide change in Ireland.) In a very crucial sense, Spain now sees itself as part of Europe. How generalizable Spain’s liberalism will be we can only wait to see, but at the very least it shifts the horizon for a European conception of marriage rights away from a Northern-only gay-rights culture to a geographically wider one. Undoubtedly this will help pave the way for other Southern European countries to conceive of the inconceivable.
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