Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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   You get drivel about aliens, abduction etc from all sorts of people, not just Christians – there are atheists, agnostics…

2. 

   […] last time I had had occasion to write about Rowan County clerk Kim Davis, above, was three years ago…

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   Whatever is presented on the BBC, and I must admit I do not watch the TV, the fact is that…

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   “The curriculum had already drawn tensions among the county’s religious parents, with some worrying about appropriateness and arguing the material…

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   As someone who produced dozens of nativity plays as a teacher and a Sunday School leader, that title ‘A Gay…

FOR one horrible moment last week I thought that the highly progressive country I chose to settle in almost 14 years ago would lurch to the right, giving greater power to the misogynistic and deeply homophobic Vox Party, led by Santiago Abascal, above.

I had every reason to be apprehensive. Polls ahead of last Sunday’s snap general election, called by charismatic socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, indicated that Vox and other far-right parties were poised to make substantial gains that would reverse radical policies that deeply conservative Christians found unpalatable.

Ahead of the election, CNN reported that Vox:

Looks set to continue its meteoric rise in Sunday’s general election, and it aims to use its growing influence to roll back decades of progress in women’s rights by blocking abortion access, repealing legislation on gender-based violence and shutting down the ministry of equality.

Among those who hoped for a strong show of support for Vox was the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, which was particularly outraged over the Sánchez government’s November 2020 Education Law that downgraded religious teaching and restricted state funding for Catholic schools.

Angelus News quoted Juan Carlos Corvera, President of Spain’s Educatio Servanda association—founded in 2006 to defend Christian education—as saying:

With the general election now set, there are great expectations of change. While economic crises have always previously served as the main catalyst for political change in Spain, this could be the first time a government has been replaced for fundamentally ideological reasons.

Angelus made the point that:

Image via YouTube

Sánchez (above) became the first Prime Minister of Spain to decline taking his inaugural oath on the Bible in June 2018, and formed a left-wing coalition with the Podemos party in January 2020 under a program pledging liberal changes.

According to CNN, feminist activists were concerned that that a new right-wing administration would turn back the clock to a time when Spanish women had very limited rights, with one campaigner saying that Vox entering the national government would mean “going back 40 or 50 years at a stroke.”

Mercifully, the Spanish electorate—fearful of a return to the dark days when the Catholic Church wielded enormous political clout—decisively saw off Vox, which has consistently defended of the Catholic religion and “traditional moral values.”

In Castilla y León—the region Vox boasted would be a “model” for the rest of the country— the party lost five of the six deputies it had. In the rest of Spain the party lost 600,000 votes, and dropped from 52 seats to 33 in the national parliament.

This is most likely due to the fact that they had seen what was happening in regions ruled by Vox.

Two examples: LGTB+ flags were removed from town halls during Pride celebrations and a performance of one of Virginia Woolf’s works was cancelled in the Madrid region. The move, prompted by Vox, led to a question being asked in the European parliament about “cultural censorship” in Spain.

Vox strongly defends of the Catholic religion and “traditional moral values”—values such as xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia.

Current situation

As things stand, according to Polito, the inconclusive national vote resulted in a split parliament with no clear governing majority. The center-right Popular Party secured the most votes, but it doesn’t have nearly enough seats to form a government on its own or even with the far-right Vox party, its preferred coalition partner.

I chose to leave the UK in 2010 after seeing the Spain’s rush towards enormously progressive policies. Having watched, first hand over several decades, Spain’s headlong retreat from fascism to become a liberal democracy, I decided that this was where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

In 2005, Spain became the third European country to legalise marriage equality and the second to allow adoption by same-sex couples. At the same time, Spaniards took on sexism by adopting one of the world’s most advanced set of laws on gender equality and violence against women.

Most lately, it legalised euthanasia, which I have advocated for for decades.

A 2021 survey by the market research company YouGov found Spain to be the most accepting of LGBTQ+ people in the eight countries it polled, with 91 percent saying they’d be supportive if a family member came out as gay or bisexual, and 87 percent saying they’d feel the same if the person were transgender or nonbinary. Madrid’s Pride parade, which takes place this Saturday, is the largest in Europe.

Reflecting now on my resettlement, I am delighted that I got out of the UK before it began regressing in earnest into the xenophophic fortess it has now become under the rule of an utterly incompetent, nasty and corrupt Conservative Party.

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