Eeeeeerk!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4106890.stm

Spaniards to stage anti-gay rally

Thousands of people are expected to take to the streets of Madrid to protests against government moves to legalise gay marriage.
The protests will be led by Roman Catholic bishops and members of the conservative opposition Popular Party.

Over 500 buses have been laid on to ferry people to Madrid, along with special flights from the Canary Islands and Spanish areas in Morocco.

In April the lower house voted for gay couples to marry and adopt children.

Sweeping changes

The Vatican condemned the bill, which if also passed by the Spanish Senate, will make Spain the first European country to allow homosexuals to marry and to adopt children.

The head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council on the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, denounced the legislation as profoundly iniquitous.

When Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took office over a year ago, he made it clear he intended to remove what he called the Church's undeniable advantages and make Spain a secular state.

Mr Zapatero has indicated that he also intends to streamline divorce law and even to relax the conditions placed on abortion.

Resistance

Opinion polls suggest that a majority of Spaniards support the gay marriage and adoption bill.

However, the move has met resistance in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation, with several Spanish mayors saying that they will refuse to marry same sex couples if the bill becomes law.

The march, due to begin at 1800 (1600 GMT), is being organised by the Spanish Forum for the Family (FEF), a lay Catholic group, whose slogan for the march is "The family is important. For the right to have a mother and father. For liberty".

They estimate that about 500,000 people will join the demonstration.

Gay and lesbian groups are staging their own counter protest a short distance from the march to voice their support for the bill.

________

I just can't believe it. I thought there would be next to no people and what am I seeing on TV? Lots and lots of people! They've sold it as the "family gathering" but I'm extremely sceptical that anyone actually took it as such. I have the helicopter flying on top of my house all afternoon.

Why oh why don't people "live and let live"? These things make me feel so ashamed

We have three rallies in Madrid right now in an area of say 5 km. One's this one, the other's the counter-rally to this one and then there's Carlinhos Brown playing in the streets too. Crazy! I wonder what would happen if the three got together at some point :P

more bullshit from the good people who run the RC church

i wonder how surprised they'd be to find out that gay people are actually ok folk who just like boning their own gender.

anyways if someone can be gay then it's kinda down to god is it not?

Of course they're trying to keep it down by saying they like homosexuals only they don't want them to be able to get married or adopt children, which in my book amounts to basically the same: they don't like them at all. Otherwise they'd let them do whatever they want.

What I don't get is, nobody is making the church marry them. It's the *state* that's going to marry them. So the church should keep to its field. I'd understand the fuss if the state was making the church marry them, but they aren't!

yeah i didn't know the church had a cartel on marriage.

when i auditioned for big brother (many moons ago when I was young and foolish might I add) they asked us alot of questions to see who gave controversial answers and gay marriage came up. pretty much everyone agreed that if it's outside the church then who gives a **** apart fromt he church?

Some people have way too much time on their hands. If it doesn't infringe on them in any way, why bother. Like Jefferson said, "...it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg..." Or something very close to that.

That said, if you don't like gays, nobody should care about that either, until you start infringing on them.

Adrian

Hehe, as always happens with these things the organisers say there has been a million people there and the rest say about 166,000. Quite a difference, eh? It probably is far from one million but sadly also well over 200,000

I wonder about the people in the world some days - really I do. Why does everyone seem to have a need to tell others how to live their lives?

Kathleen