By Sara Bailac *, Pilar Vallugera*, Diana Riba*, Tània Verge* and Raquel Sans*
The rights we have today are the result of a long struggle to conquer them. Women’s rights and the rights of the LGBTI+ community have been recognized after centuries of oppression and based on demands and social mobilization to enforce them. Current legislation recognizes the right of women to decide about their own body, the rights of LGTBI+ people to marry and have children or the right to die with dignity.
Therefore, it is alarming that the doors of the parliamentary chambers are being opened to ultra-conservative groups that promote a setback in the rights of women or the LGTBI+ community, rights that have cost a lot to achieve. It is a threat that the seats of popular sovereignty are filled with speeches that conflict with fundamental rights, and that very often incite hatred, discrimination or violence towards women and LGBTI+ people, especially against people trans.
We experience this tension daily in the parliamentary chambers when extreme right-wing parties deny the existence of sexist violence, and the resources that must be directed to combat it, question the right of women to decide about their own bodies, or put into question questioned the right of LGBTI+ people simply to exist. Also, when ultra-conservative discourses clearly threaten equality and rights that, as Simone de Beauvoir said, “are never acquired”, but rather “a political, economic or religious crisis is enough for women’s rights to be questioned.”
The umpteenth attack on these rights is ultra-conservative political activism organized on a global scale to influence legislative chambers and international politics. It is no small matter that the Popular Party opens the doors of the Spanish Senate to host a summit of the Political Network of Values, a lobby against women’s rights, which does not respect the Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe, and which denies rights. to people from the LGBTI+ community. The summit, which will take place on December 2 in the upper house, will serve as a loudspeaker for the reactionary theses of politicians from around the world, from the Hungarian president’s party Victor Orbánfrom the former Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaroor the current Argentine president Javier Mileito deputies from Uganda, where one of the harshest anti-LGBTI+ laws in the world has recently been approved with penalties that include life imprisonment, to former PP leaders, such as Jaime Mayor Oreja. Also, to other political leaders around the world who have expressed their support for the dictatorships of Augusto Pinochet in Chile or Francisco Franco in the Spanish State.
As parliamentarians committed to the rights of women and LGTBI+ groups, who defend plural societies where everyone can freely develop their life projects, we consider that democratic institutions do not have to be a space for the promotion of those groups that threaten these rights that are finally recognized and contemplated by legislation and that must be guaranteed. For this reason, the authorization by the Senate Board to hold this reactionary summit forces us to respond and demand that the parliamentary chambers must be, now more than ever, a bastion of defense of human rights and a space of confrontation with ultra-conservative movements and, in no case, a platform from which to amplify speeches that even threaten democracy.
We say no to the anti-abortion, anti-LGBTI+ and anti-rights summit: neither in the Senate nor anywhere.
*Senator, *Deputy, *Europarliamentarian, *Deputy, *Vice President of the Parliament
#Senate
