Spanish Church Prepares for Battle on Gay Marriage

In his vicarage overlooking the beet fields and pastures that stretch past the Church of Santiago de Sancobad, Father Antonio Seijas had clear opinions on Spain's socialist government as it prepared yesterday to introduce gay marriage.

"This government is disgraceful, pornographic," said Father Seijas, a parish priest in this small, traditional country town in the north-western region of Galicia. "It is not just Catholic values that are being destroyed, but human ones."

The elderly Father Seijas, "Don Antonio" to his parishioners, is, however, increasingly alone in his beliefs, even in Vilalba, one of Spain's most conservative and Catholic areas.

Prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's socialist cabinet yesterday approved a draft law that will make Spain the third country in Europe, after Holland and Belgium, to have gay marriage.

"Our constitution guarantees the right to marriage ... We're going to extend that right to people who historically have been discriminated against: homosexuals," said the justice minister, Juan Fernando López Aguilar.

It was a sign that Spain is moving rapidly away from the church-established mores that ruled the countryside when Don Antonio was born here 75 years ago.

But it puts Mr Zapatero on a collision course with a Spanish church that is currently led by another son of Vilalba, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela. "We will end up with systematic destruction [of the family], of the basic cell of society," the cardinal warned in one of several broadsides against Mr Zapatero recently.

Mr Zapatero has been denounced as anti-religious, while a spokesman for the Spanish Bishop's Conference this week claimed that introducing gay marriage was like "imposing a virus on society".

Church authorities have even encouraged Spaniards to take to the streets to protest against this and other proposed measures, which include downgrading religious education in schools and easing restrictions on divorce and abortion.

Until recently these sentiments were echoed by the conservative People's party, which was ousted from power nationally in March elections but maintains control of Galicia's semi-autonomous government through the regional leader, Manuel Fraga.

Mr Fraga, a former minister in General Franco's dictatorship and founder of the People's party, is also from Vilalba. A bust of the 81-year-old veteran has stood in front of the town hall for the past 34 years.

In recent years Mr Fraga has labelled as "vandals" and "anarchists" those who want to introduce gay marriage or give rights to unmarried cohabiting couples. "Some are seeking to destroy the family," he warned during his last election campaign.

But the People's party, seeing a high general level of acceptance for gay marriage among Spaniards, has done a rapid U-turn. This week it announced that it backed a form of civil union for homosexual couples that would, however, exclude both the description "marriage" and the right to adopt children.

In Vilalba, the People's party deputy mayor, Gerardo Criado, claimed that, despite the town's conservative, Catholic reputation, few people would be scandalised if a gay couple here suddenly got married: "People may be traditional, but they are not necessarily that conservative. Different sexual expressions have always existed in the countryside and people have always known that."

Opinion polls, including one that shows gay marriage has wider acceptance in Spain than in traditionally liberal Sweden, indicate that is true for the rest of the country, too. Xosé Manuel Irimia, an opposition town councillor for the left-leaning Galician Nationalist Block agrees. "One thing is what the church tells people to do, and another is what people actually do," he said.

But it still proved impossible to find anyone in Vilalba who was openly gay. With a population of 15,000, its streets are dotted with granite crosses and signs pointing pilgrims along the Way of St James to nearby Santiago de Compostela.

"I know people who are gay here, but none of them have come out of the closet and that is a decision I have to respect, though it would make no difference to me if they did," said Mr Irimia.

To find a gay campaigner in these parts you have to migrate to the big cities. In Santiago de Compostela, Carlos Valcarcel, spokesman for a local gay activists' group, said: "This means a lot to us. For the first time we are being treated as equal citizens."

He, too, thought Spaniards would find homosexual marriage easy to accept. "It already seems to me that we are less apart from the rest of society than gays in countries like Britain," he said. "You don't find gay ghettoes here."

Mr Zapatero's upcoming raft of social legislation is the most obvious sign that he wants to bring change to Spain.

Withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, which he ordered immediately on taking office, has been a popular measure, with opinion polls showing wide backing. But opponents accuse Mr Zapatero of being little more than a winning smile with a be-nice-to-people attitude that will not stand the strains of being in power.

"That image is purely cosmetic and the laws he is bringing in are not, really, going to make that much difference to people," said Mr Criado.

That is certainly not how Spain's homosexuals were feeling yesterday. "I did not vote for Zapatero, but I believe in him and I will defend him," said Mr Valcarcel.