The Associated Press reported that members of the opposition Socialist party in Spain claimed that officials from the ruling Conservative party that governs Madrid’s town hall had installed an Internet filter that blocked lawmakers from performing web searches for terms like “sex” and “sexuality.”
Angeles Alvarez, director of gender equality issues for the Socialists, said that when she recently tried to look up information on a Spanish-run reproductive health campaign in Latin America, a “denied-access” warning flashed across her screen after she entered “sexuality” into a search engine.
“Our access to channels of information is cut simply for using the word sexuality,” Alvarez told reporters on Thursday, according to the AP. Another official from the town hall, David Lucas, said that he had encountered the block as well.
A town hall official who declined to give his name because of a policy that prohibits him from speaking to the media on the record said Friday that no new filter has been installed on the town hall system. He said that the system blocks access to adult sites, but that searches for “sex” and “sexuality” will still allow access to sites that offer sex education materials and health issues.
While the anonymous official disputed the town hall filter assertion, there is no such ambiguity regarding a Spanish court’s banning of the sale of an issue of the weekly satirical magazine El Jueves late last month.
A cartoon on the cover of El Jueves depicted the heir to the Spanish throne, Prince Felipe, having sex with his wife, Princess Letizia. In the cartoon, Letizia is kneeling on the bed in front of Felipe, who is saying to his wife “Do you realize that if you get pregnant it will be the closest that I come to working in my life?”
According to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), the cartoon was a criticism of a recent announcement from the Spanish government that families would be given 2,500 Euros for each new child they have — a move designed to bump up the declining Spanish birth rate.
Juan del Olmo, a high court judge, ordered that the magazine be removed from newsstands after finding that the cartoon “struck at the honor and the dignity of the people represented.”
Following seizure of the magazine from newsstands, dozens of copies of El Jueves, which sells for $3.45, went up for sale on Spanish eBay, garnering up to $138 per copy, according to the AFP.
The judge’s decision was widely criticized by the Spanish media, with only the conservative paper ABC supporting the decision. ABC wrote that the cartoon was an example of “a climate in which civic and moral values are ever more relaxed and seen as relative.”
Another Spanish publication, El Mundo, conceded that the cartoon was offensive to some but fell “within what is permissible in a society where freedom of expression is a fundamental value.”
El Mundo also noted the irony that the ban of the issue only served to draw more attention to the cartoon, which went from a magazine with approximately 80,000 subscribers, to the world-spanning medium of the Internet.
“The picture, which had been seen by thousands of people, was posted on numerous websites in Spain and abroad and will now have been seen by tens of millions of people,” El Mundo wrote. “Not even the Crown’s worst enemy could have had that effect.”