Daily Blague

Spain legalised same-sex marriages on Thursday, becoming only the fourth country to do so after Belgium, Canada and the Netherlands and dealing a blow to the Catholic Church in a traditional stronghold.

That's from a Reuters story in the New York Times. Online, that is. The news is too fresh for the presses. There will be something in the paper tomorrow, I suppose. Bummer, waking up in Europe's afternoon. In any case, there are two things about the sentence that I've quoted that catch my attention. The first: "only the fourth." As Ms NOLA would say, "What is that?" The other thing, more profound, not in the text, is the reminiscence of the last time Spain tried to leap into the present. Not everybody was ready for the move, and the ensuing civil war is fondly regarded by many casual historians as a dress rehearsal for World War II's atrocities. (Funny thought that just went off with a boy-am-I-stupid pop: the heart of the European war wasn't against Russia or the Allies, but against the Jews. Just because the Jews had no military and were more or less defenseless doesn't mean that they weren't fighting. And Hitler was insane enough to put the war against the Jews ahead of the other wars when it came to, say, dispatching trains.) Perhaps we can draw hope from the fact that, this time, Spain isn't trying to catch up with the present. It's jumping into the future.