Interpretation of the Spanish Constitutional Amendment Bill as a Moral Argument

Abstract

In the context of the Spanish Constitutional Amendment Bill of 2005, the Socialist government of President José Luis Rodrguez Zapatero legalized same-sex marriage (SSM). The SSM bill was interpreted as a constitutional amendment. The original meaning of Art. 32.1, particularly its implied content, became, in sum, both an aid of constitutional moral legitimacy and an argumentative device to rebut the constitutional amendment claim made consistently by opponents of the SSM legislation. In the present analysis, it is argued that the claim of distributiveness in the original meaning was played in the legal reasoning and the legal decisions behind the implementation of the new SSM law. This incoherent distributive reading, the crux of this paper, provides insights into the theory of legal reasoning, particularly in what concerns the relation between linguistic and legal meaning. In particular, the contradictory and unfaithful approach that pro-SSM law-interpreters took to the original text demonstrates the value of linguistic meaning in legal interpretation when moral arguments alone cannot answer a legal question.