By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman
SPAIN, February 11, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Spanish People’s Party candidate for the Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, is promising to eliminate homosexual adoptions if he is elected in March, according to Spanish media reports.
“In the area of adoption I’m not in agreement. I would change it, yes, I would take the right away from them (homosexual couples),” said Rajoy in an interview yesterday.
Regarding the controversial “Education for Citizenship and Human Rights” program, which teaches pro-homosexual ideology to children in Spanish elementary schools, Rajoy said he would eliminate it and substitute language and technology classes. “I think that if we are talking about teaching values or principles, that should be studied in all classes,” he said.
Rajoy, whose party is regarded as the more conservative of Spain’s two major parties, is running a close second to socialist president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Zapatero’s Socialist Worker’s Party passed a “homosexual marriage” law in 2005 that has been bitterly opposed by pro-family groups, who also resent the government’s attempts to impose the homosexual political agenda on their children.
Although the People’s Party differs little in its social policies from the Socialist Worker’s Party, it has occupied the position of Spain’s major “right-wing” alternative to the socialists since 1982. This year it is positioning itself marginally closer to a pro-family position in an attempt to secure the votes of the country’s orthodox Catholic sector.
As previously reported by LifeSiteNews, Rajoy has made it clear that he will do nothing to restrict abortion in Spain, which has some of the most liberal abortion laws in Europe, although he has said he would enforce the fairly weak restrictions the law contains (see coverage at https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jan/08013009.html). Unlike most European states, abortion in Spain is legal up to the ninth month of pregnancy, requiring only that a diagnosis of “psychological risk” to the mother be given by a physician.
Rajoy made the clarifying statement about homosexual adoption after an earlier interview, in which he claimed he would not rescind the rights granted to homosexuals by the government’s “gay marriage” legislation, which caused concern and confusion among pro-family groups seeking to protect minors from adoption by homosexuals.