Among other things, the Citizenship class recommends girls lose their virginity before marriage, say critics. According to Libertad Digital, a popular conservative Spanish electronic news site, the Socialist’s argue that such behavior is needed to ensure girls “won’t be servants to unlimited prejudices and macho customs.”

By Robert Duncan

The Spanish government says its new Education Law will promote plurality in a modern, democratic state. The law’s critics claim it is a tool for the Socialist government to indoctrinate students.

Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela of Madrid has said the course “clashes with the fundamental principles of the Constitution and with the right of parents to choose their children's moral instruction."

At the heart of the controversy is an obligatory Citizenship class (Educacíon para la Ciudadanía) taught over four years, beginning with 11-year old students. The course is being introduced this September in seven provinces, with a full rollout in the nation’s 17 provinces next year. The Church says the course teaches a vision of man that is not Christian. Among other things, the Citizenship class recommends girls lose their virginity before marriage, say critics. According to Libertad Digital, a popular conservative Spanish electronic news site, the Socialist’s argue that such behavior is needed to ensure girls “won’t be servants to unlimited prejudices and macho customs.”

Fernando Larrain Bustamante of the pro-family organization SOS Familia said that educational material used in the course infringes upon the rights of parents to educate their children in questions relating to religion and morality. The course “supports abortion, premarital sex and the classic theory of class warfare. The material isn’t neutral,” said Larrain.

Other critics point out that the course teaches that there are 30 types of family units, and that the definitions of male and female are antiquated and should be replaced by the terms of gender – identified as being of seven varieties that can be freely chosen by individuals.

The course teaches that “if you don’t like one gender then you can just change for another one, just like you change clothes,” said Antonio Del Moral, a state prosecutor and critic of the course.

The Spanish Forum for the Family (Foro Español de la Familia) wants Spain’s courts to intervene and is encouraging parents to be conscientious objectors in clear defiance of the Socialist government’s stance that such status cannot be claimed. “We don’t have all the numbers, but we do know that there are around 15,000 people” who have claimed conscientious objector status, said Benigno Blanco, president of the Spanish Family Forum (Foro Español de la Familia), the same group that organized millions to protest the Socialist government’s same-sex marriage legislation in 2005.

While the government went ahead with that legislation, Blanco is optimistic in this case as he foresees a favorable court ruling. “All conscientious objection cases eventually end up in court,” with a favorable ruling, “as it is a right guaranteed by the nation’s constitution,” Blanco said.

There is another way the case could end up before the courts – testing regional versus national powers. Some regional governments ruled by the Partido Popular – such as Madrid – have said they will ignore the Socialist government and allow parents to claim conscientious objector status. In the case of Madrid, the regional government said it would accept voluntary social work as an alternative to the Citizenship course in 2008.

For its part, SOS Familia has launched a letter-writing campaign that seeks to convince the government to hold off the full application of the Education Law until 2008 – after the upcoming general elections. As Larrain explained, “We don’t think that it makes much sense to implement a new education law just months before the general elections when the opposition party has said that if they come to power they will abolish the law.” Since the launch of its campaign one month ago Larrain says on average around 2,000 letters each day are being sent to the Prime Minister’s office.

In another case, Carlos Seco Gordillo, a conscientious objector and attorney in the southern province of Andalusia, presented mid-August a petition to the regional court opposing the government’s plan in “defense of the moral liberty of our children.” Seco’s petition has since been mirrored by other concerned parents.

According to Antonio Santos, president of the Family Studies Institute (IDEFA), the Citizenship course is “an unnecessary invasion on the part of the government that encroaches on the rights and primary duties of parents in the education of their children. By imposing one, unique school of thought in the classroom, and the difficulties with which parents can express their constitutional right to be conscientious objectors, these are yet further examples of this government’s lack of democratic criteria.”

None of the pro-family organizations have received a response from the Socialist government. However, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero insisted recently his administration’s “firm intention” to implement the Education Law ahead of elections. "No faith is above the law. Faith cannot be imposed,” Zapatero argued. “Spain is a nonconfessional state, and its principles of laicism guarantee pluralism.”

In response, Bishop Ricardo Blazquez Perez of Bilbao, and president of the Spanish bishops' conference, said “Faith is not imposed, but rather it is proposed …The State is nonconfessional so that believers and non-believers, of one faith and others, can develop the religious liberty for which we have a right.”

Archbishop Antonio Cañizares of Toledo, vice-president of the Spanish Bishops Conference, noted that “laicism also cannot be above the law,” but this isn’t the case in Spain “where laicism is being consecrated as the official religion.”

In that vein, the Spanish Catholic Church issued a statement that said the Citizenship course "implies a serious wound to the original and inalienable right of parents and schools, in collaboration with them, to choose the moral formation that they want for their children. This is a right recognized by the Spanish Constitution (article 27.3). The government cannot supplant the society as an educator of the moral conscience."

Elsewhere the statement noted that if schools lose their ideological neutrality it “will impose on whoever has chosen the Catholic religion and morality another moral formation that hasn't been chosen by them."

In response to the Church’s reaction, Gregorio Peces-Barba Martínez, a Socialist heavyweight and one of the authors of Spain’s constitution, recently wrote a scathing editorial in the nation’s most widely-read newspaper, the left-leaning El Pais. Peces-Barba warned that if the Church doesn’t stop attacking the education course, "it will be necessary to address the topic of the actions and situation of the Church and establish a new status, that puts them in their place and that respects the autonomy of the civil authority."

The government insists those who oppose the mandatory class are involved in a smear campaign.

Mercedes Cabrera, Minister of Education and Science, has said that the course forms part of a “philosophy” to educate students in the values of a varied, democratic system that is based on tolerance and dialogue. Cabrera said that those who oppose the course are “those who sadly don’t know, or are distorting,” the contents of the course. “They are creating problems where there are none,” according to Cabrera.

Those words, however, don’t faze Blanco. “I’m not a prophet, but I believe we will win this case.”

Article written for National Catholic Register -- Sept. 2007


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Robert Duncan is a journalist and ombudsman for foreign press in Spain. He is an Executive Board Member and Vice-President for the Organización de Periodismo y Comunicación Ibero-Americana, and Vice-President of the energy and telecommunications association, APSCE. He is News Editor for Spero News, and Editor-In-Chief of EnerPub and Santificarnos.

He has also been published in World Catholic News, National Catholic Register, Renew America, Lifesite.net, as well as Capital Hill Coffee House, Common Conservative, The Conservative Voice, Enter Stage Right, News By Us, Conservative Crusader, World Net Daily, Mens News Daily and others. Robert was the bureau chief for an international news agency in Madrid for many years, and was published regularly in Dow Jones Newswires, with articles appearing in The Wall Street Journal.

1. "Text is useless. I use it to kill roaches in my room."

2. "He teaches like Speedy Gonzalez on a caffeine high."

3. "In class, the syllabus is more important than you are."

4. "Help! I've fallen asleep and I can't wake up!"

5. "Text makes a satisfying 'thud' when dropped on the floor."

6. "The class is worthwhile because I need it for the degree."

7. "His blackboard technique puts Rembrandt to shame."

8. "Textbook is confusing ... someone with a knowledge of English should proofread it."

9. "Have you ever fallen asleep in class and awoke in another? That's the way I felt all term."

10. "This class was a religious experience for me ... I had to take it all on faith."

11. "The recitation instructor would make a good parking lot attendant. Tries to tell you where to go, but you can never understand him."

12. "Problems sets are a decoy to lure you away from potential exam material."

13. "Recitation was great. It was so confusing that I forgot who I was, where I was, and what I was doing -- it's a great stress reliever."

14. "He is one of the best teachers I have had... . He is well-organized, presents good lectures, and creates interest in the subject. I hope my comments don't hurt his chances of getting tenure."

15. "I would sit in class and stare out the window at the squirrels. They've got a cool nest in the tree."

16. "The absolute value of the TA was less than epsilon."

17. "TA steadily improved throughout the course... . I think he started drinking and it really loosened him up."

18. "Information was presented like a ruptured fire hose spraying in all directions -- no way to stop it."

19. "I never bought the text. My $60 was better spent on the Led Zeppelin tapes that I used while doing the problem sets."

20. "What's the quality of the text? 'Text is printed on high-quality paper.'"

21. "The course was very thorough. What wasn't covered in class was covered on the final exam."

By Matthew M. Anger

My son, keep the commandments of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother. Bind them in thy heart continually, and put them about thy neck. When thou walkest, let them go with thee: when thou sleepest, let them keep thee, and when thou awakest, talk with them (Prov. 6:20-22).

A reviewer of Steve Kellmeyer's recent book, Deception: Catholic Education in America, makes an important but seldom acknowledged point:

Once upon a time in America, parents taught their children at home. They might use governesses, tutors or family members; whoever they used to teach their children, parents were given and took responsibility for their children's education (Mary Gildersleeve, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, November 2005).

It is a fact worth repeating because it has implications not just within the context of the immediate homeschool vs. public school debate. It is relevant to Christian education and parenting as a whole.

In the past forty years of Church crisis, conservatives have consistently emphasized the achievement of Catholic educational establishments prior to the 1960s. Understandably so. But if Catholic education was as perfect as it seemed to be in the 1950s, how did the moral and intellectual meltdown of the next decade take place? And have newer traditionalist establishments been entirely free of the scandals that pervade our society? While this does not negate the validity of outside-the-home instruction, it does raise some good questions.

Rise and Fall of Parochial Schools

In solving any problem one needs to look beyond proximate cause and effect. Otherwise we fail to see the more remote, yet ultimately fundamental, issues. This is often the case in discussions on religion within the American context, because our response is ambiguously framed by individuals (perhaps well-meaning) who are already two or three times removed from a valid source of orthodoxy. The issue of "parochial schools" appears to fit this paradigm. As Mary Gildersleeve reminds us

Compulsory education laws, passed in the United States during the 1800s, took [catechetical] responsibility away from all parents. Catholic parents lost the opportunity to teach their children at home, to teach their children the Faith. American bishops acted to protect their own. As public schools blossomed, many with a Protestant agenda, the bishops encouraged (and later demanded) the establishment of parochial schools in every diocese in America. Further, the bishops strongly encouraged the American Catholics to send their children to diocesan schools.

Parochial schools initially performed well. So long as they were staffed by devoted religious and priests, Catholic children were taught their faith. But with the Vatican II-era and concomitant collapse of religious teaching orders, a secular agenda took over. Nor did it help that the influx of salaried lay teachers caused costs to skyrocket making the parochial alternative difficult on material as well as spiritual grounds.

Return to Normalcy

While the establishment of formal Catholic schooling met many needs, it was not a panacea. Moreover, it was a reaction to another problem — unfair competition by state backed schools. Seen in that light, the shift back to homeschooling is not so much an emergency "stop gap" as a return to normalcy.

It is Steve Kellmeyer's contention that the parents remain the primary catechists. Homeschoolers, in particular, have a big advantage, since they have already undertaken other aspects of their children's education. Looked at from a classical ethical perspective — which goes back to Aristotle's critique of communism — ownership engenders responsibility. Take away that direct ownership and involvement, not only on an economic, but on a social and instructional level, and you have problems. When parents fob off their kids on schools and teachers, they are less likely to take a serious interest in their formation.

Working in the Aristotelian tradition, classic economists like Milton and Rose Friedman (Free to Choose) offer a calm but withering analysis of public schools. As with other statist monopolies, the biggest problem with government controlled education is that parents have no real "buy in" in their child's instruction. For all the hype about PTA and parent involvement, it can only foster a climate of moral neglect. On their own initiative, however, parents have responded through homeschooling or through private institutions (and the promotion of vouchers).

The Friedmans give every encouragement to educational alternatives, thus echoing the view of Hilaire Belloc in the 1920s: "The right of the parent over the child is prior to the right of the State." Of course, reform cannot happen without a change in moral attitudes. Most parents seem happy enough letting the tax-funded "village" raise their child. Sadly, the widespread relinquishment of family responsibility is part of a larger pattern within Catholic culture. We see it, for example, in the tendency to equate social teaching with trade union politics. Such ideological dependence — growing out of the 19th century invasive secularism — views lobbying and "activism" rather than personal accountability as the answer to everything.

The Totalitarian Classroom

In terms of the American experience, less than 200 of the past 400 years involved state-run education. All of the Founding Fathers were instructed by parents and tutors, and even after the rise of public schooling, prominent Americans like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright, and George Washington Carver received their education at home.

In the overall Western experience, state controlled education is the exception. In ancient times that exception was Sparta. It was also an early precedent for anti-family ideology. As classical scholar E. B. Castle says: "In Sparta and Athens... we are confronted with two highly contrasted educational ideals which can be easily recognized in educational practice today" (Ancient Education and Today). To put this in context, consider what the Greek chronicler Plutarch tells about the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus (c. 800 BC).

Lycurgus was of a persuasion that children were not so much the property of their parents as of the whole commonwealth.... [N]or was it lawful, indeed, for the father himself to breed up the children after his own fancy; but as soon as they were seven years old they were to be enrolled in certain companies and classes, where they all lived under the same order and discipline, doing their exercises and taking their play together.

Lycurgus wanted to control education so strictly as to regulate marriage. Children were subject to harsh discipline and exercise. Eugenics (and homosexuality) was even more arduously pursued in Sparta than the rest of pagan Greece. Spartan women were scorned by other nations for their aggressive, unfeminine behavior, while boys learned to be deceitful and ruthless to outsiders, even as they displayed automaton-like loyalty to their own. Presaging militaristic Prussia and Hitler's Reich, Spartans lived only for the state which, in turn, existed only for war. In key respects, the structure of Sparta's totalitarian education is indistinguishable from the aims of the left-liberal establishment.

More Lessons from History

By contrast with the Spartans, the Athenians, who reached the greatest heights of intellectual and artistic achievement in ancient times, relied consistently on private institutions. In republican Rome, the family was the school. Speaking of the Romans, Plutarch relates Cato's loving instruction of his son, which included everything from writing and history to boxing and military science. Elsewhere, he mentions Tiberius Gracchus' widow Cornelia, who took "upon herself all the care of the household and the education of her children," thus proving herself "so discreet a matron, so affectionate a mother, and so constant and noble-spirited."

E. B. Castle says that in this "closely knit family life the boys and the girls of early Roman times received their education as much from the mother as from the father...." Though education would later become more refined, with the influx of Greek learning, "home training... was essentially a school of morals; filial obedience, modesty of mien and deportment, self control, were the things that mattered." Rome gradually accepted the Greek school system. Yet it remained free from public direction, even in the late empire when some teacher salaries were paid out of public funds. Even more than Athens, the family in Rome was seen as the building block of society. Cicero appealed to citizens of the late Republic in these terms

I ask you to listen to me... as a Roman citizen, who thanks to his father's care has had a liberal education and who has loved study from boyhood, yet owes more to experience and to the lessons of the home than books.

Of all ancient role models the best example (and the one frequently overlooked) is that of the Hebrews. Says Castle, "It is surprising that a people who produced a superb national literature over a period of a thousand years did so without establishing a single elementary school." In this regard, Pope Benedict XVI offers a relevant insight in his meditation on the Holy Family in Nazareth:

Jesus grew up a Jew in "Galilee of the Gentiles," learning the Scriptures, without going to school, in that house where the Word of God dwelt…. Especially we recognize from the masterly way Jesus reads the Scriptures, his confident knowledge of them, and his command of the rabbinical tradition, how much he learned from their time together in Nazareth (Journey to Easter).

As in other early civilizations, the lives of children were often austere, yet there was a warmth and solicitude that surpassed even the best pagan cultures. The practice of infant exposure (infanticide) was completely unknown to this people to whom God had revealed his commandments.

The Restoration Begins at Home

Looking at education in light of ancient examples and modern experience, Prof. Castle believes that the first need of children is "a closely knit family life…where there is discipline without tyranny and security within strong bonds of affection." He also says that all new developments and activities geared towards children, even the kindness of responsible teachers, can never be substitutes for the ungrudging care of a mother or a father. From the enduring quality of the Jewish family, from the failures as much as from the successes of Greece and Rome, comes the hard truth that it is in our homes that children first learn what to want and what to admire, what is important and what is trivial, what has quality and what is shoddy, and that these things are the roots of education.

Schooling outside the home has its place. Even in a future when public schooling dwindles or disappears, private schools will fill a major role. Yet there is no doubt that parental schooling is underestimated. We must be careful not to end up in a situation like that which gave rise to public schools in the first place — parental apathy and an overdependence on outsiders to do our job for us. It is axiomatic that unless education begins at home (even if completed elsewhere) children will more readily fall prey to un-Christian influences.



Matthew Anger is a freelance journalist who has written essays on history, philosophy and literature from a Catholic perspective. He lives with his wife and eight children in the Richmond, Virginia area. He has edited The Eyewitness, a volume of short stories by Hilaire Belloc. This article was published in Seattle Catholic.



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Once again we have stories of nuns who forget they are Catholic, and believe they are above the Church. I say good riddance to such as these who would wish to teach our children.

A Roman Catholic nun quit her teaching job rather than comply with what she called an "insulting" demand for a letter declaring her a practicing Catholic.

Sister Regina Werntz sent a letter to The Citizens Voice of Wilkes-Barre on Friday explaining her decision to stop teaching in the Diocese of Scranton.

"Most of the ten sisters at Bishop Hoban ... viewed this as personally demeaning and also insulting to our religious congregations," Werntz wrote.

Werntz has taught the past nine years at Bishop Hoban High School, but was being reassigned as part of a diocesan-wide school consolidation. She had the seniority and credentials to move to another school, but refused to ask for the letter, she said.

"There was one last requirement I could not bring myself to do: ask my pastor to furnish a letter to prove that I am a practicing Catholic," Werntz wrote.

She declined further comment, saying the letter speaks for itself.

The Scranton diocese is laying off about 100 teachers as it closes several elementary and high schools in Luzerne and Lackawanna counties due in part to declining enrollment.

The diocese is basing its retention decisions on teacher qualifications, seniority and proof of good standing in the church in the form of the letters from pastors.

Some Catholics decried the nuns' treatment as insensitive.

"I think it is very offensive to ask these good sisters, who have been working and teaching and committing their lives to the church to prove they are Catholics in good standing with a letter from their pastor," said Tom O'Connor, a parent in the diocese.

A diocese spokesman said nuns were guaranteed teaching positions after the consolidation if they applied.

"There were many other sisters who apparently had no problem with the letter and submitted it without any problems," spokesman Dan Gallagher said.

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IESE seeks to transmit a spirit of service, placing a special emphasis on human, ethical and social aspects of business management – business school to open headquarters for US market in New York

By Robert Duncan

Forgive me but this column is going to be a bit different - I am going to brag a bit about a project I believe is helping foment a truly global and ethical approach to business.

IESE Business School of the University of Navarra announced today it will open a center in downtown New York. How big of news is this? Well, let’s put it this way – The Economist magazine has ranked IESE as the leading MBA program in the world, two years in a row. IESE is also the only business school in the world that enjoys a collaborative agreement with Harvard.

The news that IESE is opening offices in New York is part of the school’s 50th Anniversary celebrations, said Dean Jordi Canals to press Wednesday.

Canals added that throughout the year the school will be launching various programs. In particular, he highlighted the school’s “African Initiative,” which includes plans to launch a fourth associate business school in Africa. Other elements of the African Initiative include providing scholarships for 15 African students, the launching of an Inside South Africa program, and the promotions of a hospital in Lagos and a school in Kenya.

Behind IESE’s decision to open a U.S. center is its desire to increase the promotion of its programs for executives, set up a research center on global business and at the same time promote activities for its alumni and corporate sponsors in the world’s principal economy. The director of the new offices will be Professor Eric Weber, who will continue as Associate Dean of IESE.

“The opening of the offices in the United States is an important step for IESE. A global school has to work with global businesses, and where those businesses are,” said Canals. “If we want to be a global school, then we have to be there in the United States in an important and intensive way.”

While the IESE USA offices will initially be rented, Canals said that the school is looking for a larger place to house classes and offices. “We want in 2009 to have our own property,” Canals said.

“We want to offer U.S. businesses and students the possibility of working with a global school,” Canals said, and added that IESE is also interested in opening offices in the United States because “we want to learn,” referring to the plans to launch a research center for Global Business.

What Is IESE

Still never heard of IESE?

Here are a few more interesting facts: IESE was the first business school in Continental Europe to offer Executive Education programs (1958) and MBAs (1962) and the first school in the world to offer a bi-lingual MBA (1980). IESE has around 100 fulltime professors and 34 part-time, with faculty coming from 26 countries.

Despite having two campuses in Spain (Barcelona and Madrid), IESE is not a Spanish business school - over 80 percent of its MBA students are non-Spanish, while over 10 percent are Americans. “There is a real possibility of growth,” Dean Jordi Canals said, adding that IESE has around 30,000 alumni from 97 countries.

The internationality of IESE is something that I can personally attest too – besides working at IESE (1), I am also attending a Management course that has 25 students from 18 countries.

Canals said that IESE’s new offices in New York should be viewed within the framework of the school’s international activities, where its programs are taught on four continents: Europe (Munich and Warsaw) Asia (India, and China, together with CEIBS in Shanghai), Latin America (Brazil) and in Africa (Kenya). IESE also teaches programs in collaboration with other associate business schools in nine other countries in Latin America, Portugal, Nigeria and the Philippines. IESE has helped found 15 associate schools which are spread throughout the world. In addition, Canals said that IESE’s General Management Courses are taught in 10 countries, including the United States, Brazil, India, China, Germany, Poland and Kenya.

If you haven’t noticed yet, one of the things that makes IESE unique is its belief that business and ethics mustn’t be separated, and where a spirit of service is transmitted, placing a special emphasis on human, ethical and social aspects of business management.

Business and ethics, now that’s a novel idea …



(1) Robert Duncan is Director of International Communications at IESE Business School.

Robert Duncan is a journalist and ombudsman for foreign press in Spain. He is an Executive Board Member and Vice-President for the Organización de Periodismo y Comunicación Ibero-Americana, and Vice-President of the energy and telecommunications association, APSCE. He is News Editor for Spero News, and Editor-In-Chief of EnerPub. More of his writings can be found here, as well as at the Santificarnos website.

He has also been published in World Catholic News, National Catholic Register, Renew America, Lifesite.net, as well as Capital Hill Coffee House, Common Conservative, The Conservative Voice, Enter Stage Right, News By Us, Conservative Crusader, World Net Daily, Mens News Daily and others. Robert was the bureau chief for an international news agency in Madrid for many years, and was published regularly in Dow Jones Newswires, with articles appearing in The Wall Street Journal.

The Spanish Socialist government's support of 'Minocracy' ignores a seismic demographic shift that could rip apart the country's social fabric

By Robert Duncan

Minocracy is well and alive in Spain, and from the stench in the Moncloa vicinity one wonders if the country isn't also experiencing a case of acute indigestion.

The residence of Spain’s prime minister is in the Moncloa neighborhood. The inhabitants claim to be Socialist yet favor "Minocracy" - or the rule of the minority - by blatantly disregarding their political base and election year promises.

For example, the government appears to be more concerned about garnering the support of fringe voters, when it is not settling decade’s old scores such as the rewriting of history. In one scheme the Socialists have dredged up past horrors of the Spanish Civil War to focus on the Republican victims, while failing to acknowledge that barbarities were committed on both sides. Such legislative stunts and others - like removing statues of the Dictator Francisco Franco at midnight - tend to lessen the Socialists' credibility: after all, if a statue needs removed, why not in plain daylight?

In other areas, instead of worrying about promoting families, the Spanish government has introduced fast-track divorces and embryonic testing.

Even with respect to terrorism, the Socialists have ignored the pleas of victims and instead expressed a willingness to negotiate with ETA, ignoring that for all purposes the Basque terrorist group is actually blackmailing the Spanish state.

Logic is not this government's forte.

This is also a government that is opposed to freedom of speech, and has repeatedly attempted to censor the voice of the Catholic Church by suggesting that those who practice the Christian faith should only do so in private.

The Spanish Bishop's recently exhorted Catholics to live their faith both in private and public. The Socialist party, in turn, responded with a document that stressed its intentions of imposing a system that advocated laicism.

That Socialist document serves to further explain why this government insists that Catholic Religion Courses in public schools should no longer be under the jurisdiction of the Church. Under the Socialists’ program the teachers who would be imparting these classes could actually be people who are opposed to the Catholic faith. To understand the gravity of this, the vast majority of Spanish schools are affiliated with the Catholic Church and it is where many students receive some formation for First Communion and Confirmation, both of which the Catholic Church considers to be sacraments.

In this era of inclusiveness, the Socialist government has also included the possibility that there are religion professors teaching Islam.

This is also the government that turned a deaf ear to the million-plus persons that marched in Madrid petitioning it to not pass legislation to legalize same-sex marriages and under the guise of being inclusive allowed the very definition of marriage to be redefined. At the same time, the government ruled that judges must perform the same-sex marriages, and could not opt out on the grounds of conscientious objection. Socialist law is apparently on a higher moral plane than that of one’s conscience.

There has not been a collapse of homosexuals rushing to get married in Spain, despite very high-profile exceptions. In Madrid in 2005 there were 259 same-sex couples married, 201 of which were between men, and the remaining 58 cases between women. Interestingly, of the Gay marriages, 182 were between Spaniards, 35 were with a South American, 15 included a North American partner, while 10 were with Central Americans, seven were with Europeans, and there was one Asian.

Those figures highlight not only the apathy toward the institution of marriage on the part of the homosexual subculture, but also the government's consummate desire to seek votes in detriment of enacting legislation to foment a higher birth rate and to protect the family, not to mention its ignoring large Spanish families.

These "numerous" - or large - families need help. Help that the Socialists promised while in opposition in the form of tax incentives and subsidies. Of the over 1 million families that qualify as being numerous - having more than three children - only around 6 percent qualify for a monthly pittance of roughly 52 euros that the government provides in the form of aid. There are no real tax breaks, and certainly no incentives on par with other developed countries to encourage families to have more children. Instead, the government promises that in January electricity rates will rise 6 percent across the board - once again punishing those with large families in an exorbitant manner.

Furthermore, instead of providing incentives to help Spaniards have more children, the current government is playing peek-a-boo with a seismic demographic shift that will rip apart its social fabric. According to a recent report, immigrants will represent over 25 percent of the population by 2050, sharply higher than the current 8.5 percent.

With the country becoming increasingly dependant upon immigration and one of the world’s lowest birthrates, the government absurdly turns a blind eye to the active abortion tourist trade operating in Madrid and Barcelona, and where the price includes airline fare, abortion and hotel. No word if the drinks are on the house. Even the Dutch and English have been appalled at the ease with which late-term pregnant women can get an abortion in Spain - the flashing of money can almost always find a willing doctor to forge a document that the pregnancy had to be terminated as it was a risk to the woman.

It's not surprising that under such a hodgepodge of a platform that one can find an abundance of misguided politically correct measures throughout Spain: from renaming a public school to not offend Muslim students - which had the audacity to have been inaugurated with the name of a past Pope - to ridding school calendars of Christmas celebrations.

It smells like sulphur around Spain's PM's residence. And it's not just the nearby sewage construction contributing to the fine fragrance.

This article was originally published in Spero News, and various other sites.

Robert Duncan is a journalist and ombudsman for foreign press in Spain. He is an Executive Board Member and Vice-President for the Organización de Periodismo y Comunicación Ibero-Americana, and Vice-President of the energy and telecommunications association, APSCE. He is News Editor for Spero News, and Editor-In-Chief of EnerPub. More of his writings can be found here, as well as at the Santificarnos website.

He has also been published in World Catholic News, National Catholic Register, Renew America, Lifesite.net, as well as Capital Hill Coffee House, Common Conservative, The Conservative Voice, Enter Stage Right, News By Us, Conservative Crusader, World Net Daily, Mens News Daily and others. Robert was the bureau chief for an international news agency in Madrid for many years, and was published regularly in Dow Jones Newswires, with articles appearing in The Wall Street Journal.