Spain: Family Matters

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Though Popular Party candidate Rajoy, who lost to Zapatero in 2004, says he would not revoke gay-partner benefits, he has vowed not to subsume them under the word marriage. Pedro Zerolo, a Socialist leader and a key architect of Zapatero's reforms, finds such qualms misplaced. "Marriage has always been used as a political tool: slaves couldn't marry, blacks couldn't marry whites. There was even a law in the 15th century that comedians couldn't marry because they weren't serious. If your rights don't have the same name, they don't have the same protection or the same standing." Zerolo, whose wedding was one of the approximately 10,000 gay marriages licensed under the new law, is proud to see Spain catapult itself from behind the curve to ahead of it on these issues. "This the first time in Spanish history that we are world leaders in equality," he says. "With an effervescent economy and the recognition of the dignity of every man and woman, we are a country prepared for the future."

But even a prosperous future presents knotty challenges. In the course of just two generations, Spain's economic expansion has turned it from an emigrant to an immigrant nation. Integrating new arrivals is a Socialist priority, but many immigrants don't support the party's progressive family policies. Ana Maria Vinazza says that in the decade since she arrived from Peru, "the Spanish family has changed for the worse." Beyond her opposition to gay marriage, and concern with the loss of religious values, she sees too many Spaniards indulging the young. "Parents give children too much. You have to earn what you get in life," she says, seated around a table with her 14-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son.

Along with an influx of practicing Catholics from Latin America, Spain has seen the arrival of an estimated 1 million Muslims in the past two decades, mostly from North Africa. Moroccan-born Abdul Aziz, 42, is likewise skeptical of gay marriage, and the ease with which many native Spaniards jettison the traditional family unit. "There are so many people not married, with no children. For me, this is not life. Life should be a mother, father, children," says the unemployed construction worker and father of two. He says Islam is a regular part of his life, even as he becomes more and more Catalan: "It helps to preserve the traditions. It is not a good thing if you lose roots. Religion remains a constant through the changes of history."

A Catholic Legacy
Even before 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella vanquished Granada, the last stronghold of Muslim rule on the Iberian peninsula, the Roman Catholic Church set a rigorous religious tone for Spain. For centuries, the Catholic faith — and the patriarchal family structure that it inspired — was the foundation of daily life from the hills of the Basque country to the Andalusian coastline. But the Spanish church was often an overbearing, sometimes repressive presence that brought the Inquisition and provided cover to Franco's fascist regime. Its influence was exemplified by the introduction of the Spanish Civil Code's Article 57, the so-called permiso marital, which required wives to obey their husbands. It was only abolished a few years before Franco died in 1975.

The evolution of social customs quietly accelerated after the dictator's death. Unlike the worldwide headlines generated by Zapatero's gay-rights legislation, there was barely a whisper with the 1978 approval of a law with much wider implications: the end to the long-standing ban on the sale of contraception. Divorce and abortion would follow, as well as some of Europe's most open access to assisted-fertility treatments. In just decades, Spain has gone from a country whose women were forced to go abroad to obtain a safe and legal abortion to one that draws thousands of couples for its advanced assisted-fertility treatment.

On his trip to Valencia in 2006, Pope Benedict XVI made it clear that he was not pleased with the changes in Spain, including same-sex marriage. "We want to make people understand that according to human nature, it is man and woman who are made for each other and can give humanity a future," he told reporters. "The family is a unique institution in God's plan." Spanish bishops have organized huge rallies in Madrid to protest Zapatero's new laws, but polls continue to show that the reforms have broad support. Indeed, after spending centuries gazing lovingly across the Mediterranean to its stronghold on the Iberian peninsula, the Holy See now views Spain as a sad example of how the West was lost to the forces of secular humanism.

Such doctrinal concerns don't exist for Rocío Martínez-Sampere and Jordi Domenech, who were born the year before Franco's death. For both of them, marriage is out of the question and careers are important. But, at 33, they are expecting their second son this spring. Becoming parents has been a balancing act for the couple: she is a rising star in the Catalan Socialist Party, and he commutes half the week to his job as an economics professor at the University of York in England. But on a recent Saturday morning in their sunny Barcelona apartment, they have a more modest ambition: to get some medicine into their 2 year-old son, Maties, who's been running a fever since the previous night. Domenech holds the twisting, crying toddler, as his mom manages to pour the syrup down the hatch.

Not surprisingly, the young couple supports the new laws that recognize a rainbow of different family models. But they depend too on the traditional boon of having two grandmothers nearby, who do regular babysitting duties. "The extended family still exists," says Martínez-Sampere. "And it works." Whichever candidate wins next week will similarly have to reconcile Spain's deep family roots with its modern ambition to have it all.