Well, The Battle of Gay Marriages has begun. Several mayors around the country have declared they’ll refuse to preside over them and some have even said they won’t delegate the responsibility either. The first victim has been the mayor of a town in Catalunia who announced he wouldn’t marry people he felt were “suffering from some sort of physical and/or mental incapacity”. He was promptly expelled from his party. In contrast, several socialist or communist mayors have said they’re bent on being the first in the country to officiate at a gay marriage. [Sorry, the pun was totally accidental, at least on a conscious level.] The recalcitrant mayors claim they have a right under the Statute of Conscientious Objection to refuse to obey the new law but it’s highly unlikely that it covers situations like this, as opposed to the military draft. But we will see.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe what you’re reading. One of today’s local papers reports that the Portuguese police have arrested twenty members of a large gypsy clan and charged them with kidnapping mental defectives in north Portugal and forcing them into slave labour in the vineyards of La Rioja. I suspect it’s considered wrong to write ‘mental defectives’ these days but, in the context, this seems a very small crime.