by TChris

My stay in Madrid happened to coincide with the city's annual gay and lesbian pride festival. From my balcony yesterday, I had a great view of the colorful parade, and of the thousands of onlookers lining the street. The celebration of unity and diversity was inspiring, but I was most taken by the absence of protest. There were no religious fundamentalists attempting to disrupt the parade, no counter-demonstrators claiming that any acceptance of LGBT rights will bring about the destruction of society. Just people enjoying the opportunity to support the right of every human being to live without oppression or discrimination.

Gay marriage, such a divisive topic in the United States, has been legal in Spain for about a year. The wild claims in the U.S. that gay marriage is a threat to the family are belied by all the heterosexual couples in Spain whose marriages have survived nicely since the law was changed. There are, of course, Spaniards who oppose equal rights for gay couples: a judge was recently censured for refusing to perform same sex marriages. But experience shows (in Spain as in Massachusetts) that gay couples function as family units just as well as straight couples. In fact, Spain recently had its first gay divorce -- just one, of the 1,300 same sex marriages performed in the last year. Let those who think that gay marriage destroys families explain that statistic.