Bullfighting of judges, politicians and members of the Judiciary against the "woke culture"

Magistrates and bullfighters share few things, but they do agree on one page of the dictionary: the word “jurisdiction.” For a judge it implies the type of lawsuits that he will study and sentence. For a bullfighter, it designates his meeting point with the bull he is going to kill. This Thursday, the Madrid Bar Association (ICAM) has brought together both worlds for the second consecutive year so that lawyers, politicians, magistrates of the Spanish judicial elite and members of the Judiciary can stand up in defense of bullfighting and against the Government, criticize the “woke culture”, regret that the bullfighter ‘Manolete’ is not studied in schools and explain that their children “are not stupid” for going to bullfights since they were little.

It is the second time that the ICAM celebrates these days by its section specialized in bullfighting law after doing so last year in Las Ventas. This year one of last year’s speakers opened fire: José Antonio Montero. Then a contentious magistrate of the Supreme Court and now a key member of the General Council of the Judiciary, he recalled that in the first edition of the congress they already wanted to send “a message of freedom and tolerance” against “the woke culture that has established itself with single thinking.” and politically correct.”

“The party is recovering, the youth is returning, perhaps in rebellion against the prevailing intolerance,” this member of the governing body of the judges added, in his brief initial intervention, before starting the first applause of the morning at the headquarters of the exclusive Serrano street in the capital. There were jurists among the speakers, but also among the guests: César Tolosa, from the Constitutional Court, who was already a speaker last year, the president of the Superior Court of Extremadura María Félix Tena, the former minister María Dolores de Cospedal or Dimitry Berberoff, recently appointed vice president of the Supreme Court, have followed a good part of the interventions.

One of the most celebrated speakers was Enrique Arnaldo. A magistrate of the conservative sector of the Constitutional Court, he is a regular at bullrings and has written numerous academic articles on the subject. This Thursday he stated with a laugh that the most important position of his career is not the one he holds in the court of guarantees but the one he held in the Center for Bullfighting Affairs of the Community of Madrid, he acknowledged that he is one of the few who still wears a scarf in his pocket and has reviewed in detail the situation of bullfighting in Gustavo Petro’s Colombia.

He also took the gauntlet thrown by the vocal Montero and lamented the “air of hopelessness” of these days. “They tend to be defensive, we defend ourselves against the anti-bullfighting” and “totalitarianism that wants to impose uniformity of what is good, condemning others to hell.” One day after debating in the plenary session of the Constitutional Court on the legal personality of Mar Menor, Arnaldo narrowly avoided the issue of “extending the concept of person” and announced that they will continue to do “many more conferences in defense of pluralism and tolerance.” “Defend what is ours,” he added, alluding to bullfighting.

A member of the Supreme Court was in charge of addressing some of the thorniest issues of the day: whether bullfighters are legally protected from an artistic point of view and whether or not it is good to take small children to bullfights. Antonio García, one of the latest additions to the Civil Chamber, explained that closing the bullrings to the little ones would generate a “paradox”, since it would restrict the “right” of a minor to be a “bullfighter.” ”. He also explained that his own children have gone to the bullfights when they were little. “I can assure you that they are not morons, none of them,” he joked.

Many of the speakers and attendees from the judicial world are part of courts that in recent years have issued key rulings for the bullfighting sector, although none of them have signed the resolutions. These decisions were commented on Thursday and celebrated or politely booed depending on whether or not they have benefited the world of bullfighting.

The Chamber to which Antonio García belongs, for example, declared that the tasks of bullfighters cannot be protected through the mechanisms of intellectual property, something that the magistrate regretted during his presentation, denouncing a “legal vacuum” and comparing a bullfight with a rap cockfight. “It would be advisable to consider the need to expand the definition of a work,” he said. The Chamber to which Tolosa and Montero belonged until recently is the one that has largely shielded bullfighting by outlawing popular consultations such as those in Donostia or Ciempozuelos (Madrid), in addition to having forced the Government to include bulls in the Cultural Bonus Young.

Also very celebrated over five hours were the two Constitutional rulings that annulled the laws of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands that, at the time, limited or even prohibited bullfighting, as well as the resolution that confirmed a conviction of a Catarroja councilor for insulting the deceased bullfighter Víctor Barrio. Some of the speakers even recalled that there are sentences from these courts to come and made the list for the Three Wise Men. “I hope that the Supreme Court considers the Toro de Lidia Foundation’s appeal against the elimination of the national award,” said a Córdoba lawyer linked to that foundation.

“A sad bull? His mother must have died!”

Magistrates of the Supreme and Constitutional Courts and members of the Council of the Judiciary participated in the sessions or witnessed them accompanied by very significant lawyers in the world of legal defense of bullfighting, some of them linked to the Toro de Lidia Foundation, author of numerous judicial resources on the matter. For example, the one presented before the third chamber of the Supreme Court against the elimination of the national award.

Two of the lawyers who intervened were Francisco Gordón and Fernando Navarro. Presented as lawyers in the program, they are also linked to the Toro de Lidia Foundation in Córdoba and Granada, respectively. Gordón was the first to speak to review the successes of bullfighting in the Constitutional Court, citing one by one the dissenting opinions of magistrates such as Fernando Valdés, Juan Antonio Xiol, Adela Asúa, María Luisa Balaguer or the current president, Cándido Conde-Pumpido , ensuring that they made “flatly uncertain” statements and even accusing some of them of “twisting” reality.

Several speakers delighted the audience at the Madrid Bar Association by openly laughing at the theories that develop how bovine animals have feelings. “World Animal Protection. This entity says that a cow’s eyes reveal how it feels, that they love to receive affection, that just like you, cows have best friends and personalities,” Gordon said. “Does the bull show sadness? “His mother must have died!” the lawyer Joaquín Moeckel later joked. Seconds before, lawyer Fernando Navarro also regretted that the great figures of Spanish bullfighting are not in children’s textbooks. “Have you read a textbook that explains who Manolete was?” he asked. Regarding the poet Federico García Lorca, he also stated that “the part of Lorca that is interesting comes, but not the bullfighting part of Lorca.”

If bullfighters and judges agree on the term “jurisprudence”, lawyers and politicians shook hands this Thursday at the ICAM when attacking Ernest Urtasun, Minister of Culture, for eliminating the National Bullfighting Award. Miguel Ángel García, counselor of the Presidency of the Community of Madrid, closed the event by highlighting the figures of Las Ventas “as much as it may be against the current Minister of Culture”, and stating that animalism “is nothing more than another excuse” to erase Spanishness. “We will always be there to put that cape on bullfighting,” he said, before the final applause.

Hours before, the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, highlighted the same idea at the opening of the event. “Popular fervor for bullfighting is recovering, but there is a political debate, also from the ministry, with the ban on bullfighting. It is as if the Ministry of Industry was against the industry,” the mayor said at the speed of an opponent.

The general conclusion of the conference is that the rulings of the Constitutional and the Supreme Court in recent years protect bullfighting by having designated that it is a cultural event that deserves to be protected, although they regret that this shielding comes from jurisprudence and not from a “great law of bulls”, as explained by José Luque, magistrate and president of the Real Maestranza de Caballería of Seville. “If that level of jurisprudence did not exist, the bulls would be abuse,” he concluded.