Spanish
government confident same-sex marriage will withstand legal
appeal

The Spanish justice minister said Thursday that a planned legal appeal by the conservative opposition against Spain's recently enacted same-sex marriage law will likely fail in court. Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar spoke a day after the Popular Party leader, Mariano Rajoy, confirmed that his party will file the suit before the constitutional court and was forced to disavow remarks by another senior member of the party who spoke out against the idea. Rajoy has said his party has no problem with giving gay couples the same rights as heterosexual ones but insists these unions should not be called "marriage," as they are in the law passed in late June. Lopez Aguilar said it is odd that the opposition party would act against a law that he said simply extends rights to people who do not have them. He said that while in power, the Popular Party opposed the now-ruling Socialists' drives to give more rights to same-sex couples. The party, he said, "absolutely did not want to recognize the rights of those people and now says it only has a problem with the word" marriage, the minister said in a television interview. The Socialists' spokesman in parliament, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, seized on the divisions that emerged Wednesday in the conservative party over the planned legal challenge, questioning Rajoy's control over the party. The president of the Madrid regional government, the Popular Party's Esperanza Aguirre, said the lawsuit is a bad idea because it makes the party look like it opposes gays. Rajoy rejected her remarks, saying the decision is his and reflects "the feelings of many Spaniards, many of them supporters of the Popular Party and others that are not." Rubalcaba said the party is "enormously conservative" and has a leadership "that is not at all well-entrenched, that wavers and changes its mind because of influences that sometimes are within the party and not seen and sometimes are outside." This may have been an allusion to former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, who ruled for eight years until April 2004. The Socialists routinely accuse the Popular Party of being still dominated by Aznar. Spain's parliament passed the same-sex marriage law on June 30, becoming the world's third country to give full legal recognition to same-sex unions. Canada became the fourth in July. The other two are the Netherlands and Belgium. (AP)