National
José Bono defends the appointment of Carme Chacón as Minsiter for Defence
By h.b.
Apr 17, 2008 - 2:15 PM

José Bono, the new President of Congress, has spoken out in support of Carme Chacón, the heavily pregnant new Minister for Defence. Speaking on the Telecinco television programme, La Mirada Crítica, Bono, who was Defence Minister for a time in the last legislature, said it was emotional for him to see the woman inspecting the troops outside the Ministry earlier this week.

‘Whoever criticises her as a Minister should think about mother nature which is very wise and had created things half male and half female’, he said, ‘and whoever makes jokes about pregnant women who are ministers should think about whether they are real men who were, before reaching the cradle, in the womb of a woman’.

The naming of Carme Chacón as Minister for Defence, together with the other women who make up the majority of the Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s new cabinet, has brought forth a torrent of insults from the right wing media. Federico Jiménez Losantos on the COPE radio station, described her as ‘A Catalan nationalist in charge of the remains of the Spanish Army’.

The COPE radio station, owned by the Catholic Church in Spain, is also in the news today with the revelation in El País that they sacked a woman who had been in the company for 20 years because she is a Galician Nationalist and a lesbian, and then ignored a court order saying Isabel Quinteros should be reinstated.

Meanwhile, comments against the women in the Zapatero government from Silvio Burlusconi, the newly re-elected Italian leader, have been turned on their head today with the revelation that Burlusconi is planning to make a model he fell in love with, Mara Carfagna, into the Italian Minister for the family.