By Hilary White
ROME, July 30, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As Spain’s newly liberalized abortion law comes into effect the Spanish regional government of Catalonia has banned the ancient blood sport of bullfighting, and the irony has not been lost on pro-life observers.
Catalonia's regional parliament voted Wednesday to ban bullfighting from January 1, 2012, making it the first region in mainland Spain to outlaw the centuries-old tradition, which has inspired artists from Goya to Picasso to Hemmingway. Bullfighting promoters have called the measure “outrageous” and have vowed to “launch a huge battle” in conjunction with the conservative opposition Popular Party (PP), which sees itself as the defender of Spanish cultural traditions.
Monsignore Ignacio Barreiro Carambula, the director of the Rome office of Human Life International and an Uruguayan of Spanish descent, said that the banning of bullfighting in Spain, like the banning of fox hunting in Britain, even as those governments promote abortion, represents a triumph of newly invented moral values based on arbitrary “progressive” whims and social fads.
He told LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) that the banning of bullfighting and the promotion of abortion is part of the same liberalizing social re-engineering project being undertaken by the far left in Spain.
Barreiro said that “a large percentage of the persons in favor of animal rights are not concerned at all about the rights of the unborn.” Those who voted for the bullfighting ban, he said, are on the progressive left, the same people who have pushed to expand abortion and homosexuality.
“This is based in a wrong ideology,” he said. “Animals should not be treated with cruelty, but animals do not have rights. Rights are inherent to the human person, so from the moment of conception, you have a human being who has rights. Animals need to be treated with respect, but is not a bearer of rights.”
“It’s an irony that these people are protecting non-existent rights and they conveniently forget about real rights of human beings. And they forget about the most basic of all rights, which is life,” Barreiro said.
Barreiro added that the efforts to ban longstanding cultural traditions like bullfighting and fox hunting is a favorite work of “progressive” liberals and socialists. “Bullfighting is part of Spanish tradition,” he said. “It’s a very ancient Spanish tradition that has to be respected. It’s a manly sport and obviously in manly sports you have risks.”
He compared it to the determination of the Tony Blair Labour party in Britain to ban fox hunting based on “animal rights,” while working to liberalize abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Barreiro put it down to the creation of “new moral values” that are based on arbitrary social fads instead of perennial philosophical norms.
“New moral values are coined that are not part of the Natural Law, and real values are destroyed or not recognized.”
“Socialists and liberals are bent on destroying the traditional customs and institutions of society.”
“The main issue,” he said, “is the protection of animals against the lack of protection of babies. But it must be mentioned, this conscious policy of different socialist and liberal governments to destroy legitimate cultural traditions of different nations. It’s a conscious decision.”
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