As you might or might know, there was an large protest against gay marriage in Madrid yestserday.

Backstory here:

The same-sex marriage legislation still must be passed by the Senate, after being approved earlier this spring by parliament in a 183-136 vote, with six abstentions. The Senate vote is scheduled for June 22, and had been seen as a mere formality. Protestors hope the demonstrations will cause Senators to think twice before voting for the bill

Now, for the coverage, here and elsewhere. Early estimates I’ve seen put the crowd figures between 200,000-half a million. I don’t know if anyone is claiming that they met the 1 million figure they had hoped for.

First, there’s nothing on the Reuters page. Not a word. Not an article, not a photo – nothing comes up in the search. Blackout there.

Next, on to the Yahoo news photo feed, which I always find interesting. Enter "spain" and "gay" and you come up with 9 photos from yesterday. One is a tight shot of the anti-gay-marriage rally. The other 8 are of a pro-gay-marriage rally, including a couple of pictures of cute babies.

Here’s an article from a Spanish paper and a rather lengthy photo slideshow

US coverage: Boston Globe, lengthy and pretty fair

NYTimes

LATimes gives a bit broader context

The law would be one of the most liberal marriage statutes in Europe. It would grant full marriage rights to same-sex couples, including the right to adopt children. It has been approved by the lower house of parliament and is expected to pass the Senate in the next few weeks. Polls have shown a large majority of the Spanish public favors allowing gay marriage.

Judging from Saturday’s protest, the adoption clause may be the most controversial. Demonstrators hoisted posters depicting a youngster with the words "I am a child, not an experiment." A waist-high boy held a sign almost lost in the crowd that read, "Zapatero had a mother and a father. Why can’t I?"

"Homosexuals are human beings with a right to form a couple but nothing more," said Adela Rodriguez, a 55-year-old nurse from Madrid. "Don’t touch the children!"

Finally, in the NYTimes magazine a lengthy piece examining some Christian anti-gay marriage activists (although this excerpt begins with a quote from a pro)

When I last spoke with Lisa Polyak, she said she was pleased that the Legislature had shown courage in addressing the civil rights of gay couples but sickened that conservative activists and the state’s governor wanted to deny them those rights. Oddly enough, though, Polyak, who once thought of this whole issue as essentially about civil rights, says that she is now in it for something more profound: she doesn’t want her children to grow up with a stigma. ”I want to lift the psychic burden on my family,” she said.

That means changing hearts. How difficult that will be was illustrated by a single vignette. When I met Polyak, she told me how, when she first testified before a legislative committee, an anti-gay-marriage activist, a woman, confronted her with bitter language, asking her why she was ”doing this” to the woman’s children and grandchildren. Polyak said the encounter left her shaken. A few days later, as I sat in Evalena Gray’s Christmas-lighted basement office, she told me a story of how during the same testimony she approached a blond lesbian and talked to her about the effect that gay marriage would have on her grandchildren. ”Then I hugged her neck,” she said, ”and I said, ‘We love you.’ I was kind of consoling her to some extent, out of compassion.”

I realized I was hearing about the same encounter from both sides. What was expressed as love was received as something close to hate. That’s a hard gap to bridge.