The long, proud march to nowhere

Opinion

The Spanish right: a political organism that has survived half a century by developing an infallible instinct for standing on the wrong side of history

Troy Nahumko

There is something almost zoologically fascinating about the Spanish right. Not courage. Not principle. Something far rarer: an evolutionary miracle. A political organism that has survived half a century by developing an infallible instinct for standing on the wrong side of history.

Divorce? Fought it.

Marriage equality? They took it to court.

Euthanasia? Never!

Now conversion therapy. The medieval parlour trick that pretends homosexuality is an ailment to be bullied, prayed or electrocuted into obedience. Spain debates outlawing this pseudoscientific circus and, once again, the PP lines up against the inevitable. They are like a drowning person furiously punching the lifeguard.

The remarkable thing isn’t that they lose. They almost always do.

The remarkable thing is what happens afterwards.

Nothing.

No apology. No “perhaps treating a considerable portion of our fellow citizens as second-class human beings was an error of judgement.” Just silence. Political amnesia so complete it deserves neurological study.

Twenty years after challenging marriage equality before the Constitutional Court, same-sex marriage has become as ordinary as supermarket receipts. Families exist. Children grow up. Society stubbornly refuses to collapse. The apocalypse RSVP’d but never arrived.

And yet the architects of that legal assault wander about today draped in the language of liberty.

Freedom.

What an abused word.

Freedom apparently means the freedom to stop other people marrying.

The freedom to permit quacks to convince gay teenagers they’re broken.

A peculiar sort of liberty. The kind that always seems to involve restricting somebody else’s.

Then comes the masterpiece.

“I’m a member of the People’s Party, I’m gay, and I’m proud of both.”

Good. Sincerely, good. Nobody should have to choose between their sexuality and their political convictions.

But then comes the vote.

Or rather, the absence of one.

When Parliament considered banning conversion therapy, Jaime de los Santos, the man who so proudly proclaimed this, abstained. He abstained on a vote to protect people like himself from being subjected to electrodes, prayer marathons, amateur exorcisms and the collected pseudoscientific lunacy of the sanctimonious who believe they can pray the gay away. His party voted against. He raised neither hand. One imagines the freedom he felt in that moment.

Rectificar es de sabios, they say. To correct oneself is the mark of wisdom. The PP, apparently, is not in the wisdom business. They are in the freedom business. Freedom! They love freedom. It says so on the banner. There it is again on Instagram, rainbow-adjacent, Pride-adjacent, carefully positioned next to a smiling candidate who almost certainly voted against something that month.

One does wonder, in the small hours, exactly which freedoms the PP supports. Those enshrined in Leviticus, perhaps? The constitutional right to stone adulterers? The sacred protection of mixed-fabric legislation? Because if the holy text that apparently governs their social imagination is to be applied selectively, and it absolutely is, nobody in Génova 13 is refusing jamón, then perhaps someone could explain the selection criteria?

The PP now hangs rainbow flags from the balconies of buildings it governs while governing alongside Vox, which does not believe LGBTI people are people at all. The flags stay up. The votes stay the same. The rebranding is exquisite. The nausea is genuine.

Freedom, in the PP’s taxonomy, is a word that means something. It means: not you. Not yet. Possibly never. But here is a flag.