Spain’s Roman Catholic bishops have never been publicly keen on homosexuality, but now they have provoked outrage by accusing gays of threatening not just the nation’s morality but its exchequer as well.
In a homily delivered in Madrid’s Almudena cathedral, the head of the country’s powerful bishops’ conference, Cardinal Rouco Varela, has claimed gay marriages will help bring the country’s social security system to its knees.
The problem, Monseñor Rouco suggested, is that gays are incapable of doing the right thing by making babies, whose future social security contributions might help to cover pensions paid to their bereaved partners. He warned of the ”dramatic consequences” of allowing gay marriages, or giving unmarried couples of any kind the same rights as married couples, by referring to what he saw as the social and moral disintegration of other, unnamed, European countries.
”These are privileged societies, now threatened with a probable breakdown of their social security systems,” he complained.
The very fabric of society is under attack, he suggested, if gay couples are given such rights.
”By pretending to give the same value to all sorts of couples, including those incapable because of their nature of producing children, as is given to the family, one ends up with systematic institutional destruction of the basic unit of society,” the cardinal complained.
Spaniards, especially gays and the one in nine Spanish couples who have not tied the knot at their local church or town hall, could have ignored the opinions of a cardinal already famed for his highly conservative views.
But the support he found in the conservative People’s Party government of Prime Minister José MarÃÂa Aznar has added insult to injury.
The Finance Minister, Cristóbal Montoro, expressed his agreement with the cardinal, warning that allowing gay marriages and giving wedded and unwedded couples equal rights will simply create extra costs.
”It endangers the current model of economic growth,” he said. ”This is not a matter of balancing social rights but a way of destroying jobs.”
Middle-class taxpayers, he warned, will end up shouldering the costs generated by gay couples and their unmarried heterosexual equivalents.
In fact, the target of both Montoro and the cardinal was not so much the country’s homosexual community but, as Spain warms up for March 14 elections, the opposition Socialist party.
It has proposed introducing a new law that will give unmarried stable couples, of whatever combination of sexes, the same rights as married couples.
The proposal reflects the fact that the number of unmarried couples in Spain has increased 10-fold over the past 20 years as a once-conservative country has played catch-up with the habits of the rest of Europe.
”It is time there was equality of rights,” Luis Zarraluqui, head of the Spanish Family Lawyers’ Association, told ABC newspaper at the weekend.
Current Spanish family law has meant, for example, that the unmarried partners of several soldiers killed when an aircraft bringing them home from Afghanistan crashed were refused the compensation handed out to the widows of their married colleagues.
The Socialists have told the cardinal to keep his nose out of politics.
”Religion and rights do not mix,” retorted Jesus Caldera, the Socialist party’s spokesperson in Parliament. ”Widows’ or widowers’ pensions are the result of what a person has already contributed, so the cost is zero,” he said.
”It seems the church is now not just worried about our souls but about our pensions,” observed Gaspar Llamazares, leader of the radical United Left coalition.
The cardinal’s outburst follows the sidelining of Father José Mantero, an openly gay priest from the southern town of Valverde del Camino, who has declared: ”Being gay is a gift from God.”
”The church hierarchy, from the pope down, is deeply homophobic. I have even heard one bishop, who admitted to me that he was gay, giving rabidly anti-homosexual sermons,” he told The Guardian.
There are, of course, homosexuals in both the Spanish Roman Catholic church and the People’s Party.
One gay activist has even threatened to out three bishops with whom he claims to have had sex when they were seminary college colleagues.
And it was the People’s Gay Platform, a group of homosexuals close to the People’s Party, which announced that it was to sue the cardinal for ”inciting discrimination”. Monseñor Rouco, meanwhile, insisted that he had been misinterpreted.
Now the People’s Party has changed its tune. Candidate Mariano Rajoy aims to repeat the absolute majority enjoyed by the soon-to-retire Aznar, and is, therefore, promising legislation for unmarried couples. The question is: do Spanish gays believe him? — Guardian Unlimited Â