Canadians and Spaniards Lead the Way for Gay Rights

The countries respectively known for curling and siestas are on the forefront of legislating equal rights for gays. How is it that we're so far behind?

While the laws in the Netherlands and Belgium also grant gays rights under a same-sex union category, they "fall short of full equality on issues like adoption, ... advocates [for gay rights] say." Today, Spain's Parliament granted full on marriage rights to gays. A similar law was passed in Canada this past Tuesday.

About the Spanish legislation >
The law lacks support from a largely conservative Senate. Too bad for the conservatives though as the Senate is largely symbolic and has no ability to prevent this law from being enacted. Spain is generally Catholic yet this issue of granting equality to their gay citizens is clearly more important than any outdated interpretations of religion or semantics.

The measure, passed by a vote of 187 to 147, establishes that couples will have the same rights, including the freedom to marry and to adopt children, regardless of gender.

"Today, Spanish society is responding to a group of people who have been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, their dignity offended, their identity denied and their freedom restricted," Prime Minister José Luis Rodíguez Zapatero told Parliament.

About the Canadian Ruling >
Opponents say liberals sold out by getting votes from separatist Bloc Québécois but the liberals point out the hypocrisy of this assertion:

Even before the vote, the Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, questioned the legislation's authority because the Liberals needed the votes of the separatist Bloc Québécois to win passage. "Because it is being passed with the support of the Bloc, I think it will lack legitimacy for a lot of Canadians," he said in a televised interview.

The Liberals shot back that the Conservatives had made a tacit alliance with the Bloc just last month in an effort to call early elections.

By the looks of the pictures and descriptions of celebration, it seems like good times to come for gays in those countries. Hopefully, these recent laws will serve as models for open minded thinking in the US. It's so infuriating that people in the US use the semantic argument against gay "marriage" as a way to impose their religious and cultural tenets on others. If they really believed in equal rights for gays they wouldn't care what they called it. As the argument for civil rights has always gone: unequal treatment for any group of people implies inequality between those people and everyone else. Is that what this country is all about? Would opponents of gay marriage have any gripes if they were denied rights granted to others?