It has been more than ten years since the Parliament of Catalonia banned bullfighting, a sinister event that was nevertheless celebrated by many people as a great step forward in progress. Logically The Constitutional Court declared sanity years later annulling that law, a real attack on cultural freedom, on freedom in general. In those unfortunate days when some Catalan politicians decided to trample a cultural expression in a shameful way, the rush hour traditional in many Catalan localities were, however, protected and preserved from the inquisitorial and prohibitionist fury.
Some days ago, the same Parliament of Catalonia approved to begin the procedures to prohibit also they rush hourauthentic Catalan popular culture in numerous locations, especially in the Ebro Lands.
And in a few years it will be something else.
Because the problem is that there is a society that allows a cultural expression to be banned, whatever it may be, just because some part of it doesn’t like it. And bullfighting, dance or theater are not about taste, they have to do with respect for culture, for cultural freedom, whether it belongs to a few or a majority, whether you understand it or not, whether you share it. or don’t share it.
We unfortunately see an alarming increase of the opposite, of puritanical and prohibitionist societies that demand an end to everything that does not correspond to their morals. We thus live in times in which books are banned in public libraries around the world because their content is inappropriate, paintings are removed from collections, plays are censored, or sculptures of Buddhas are bombed to disappear. All this in the high name of morality.