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The outcry was swift. Protesters gathered in front of City Hall to kiss en masse. The news media got into the act, and pretty soon Romero and his city were at the center of an unflattering national controversy. A satirical video posted on YouTube played a familiar cumbia-style tune with reworked lyrics and depicted Romero in a priest's collar. One editorial cartoon showed a couple kissing in a bird cage suspended by a fixture shaped to spell "PAN."
It mattered little that the mayor announced within days that the measure would be suspended. All of Mexico seemed ready to take to the ramparts in defense of a treasured institution: the kiss.
"The attitude toward kissing is a good thermometer of the tolerance of a society," columnist Federico Reyes Heroles wrote in the Reforma newspaper. He said trying to limit public kissing was like outlawing miniskirts -- the stuff of totalitarian countries. "Eros is part of life," he wrote.
In liberal Mexico City, officials have rallied to the cause of the kiss by summoning residents to a massive Valentine's Day kiss-in on the main plaza. Organizers are hoping for thousands of kissers at today's event, perhaps enough to land a spot in the Guinness World Records book.
In unveiling the kiss-athon, the city's tourism secretary, Alejandro Rojas Diaz Duran, appeared to toss a dart in Guanajuato's direction by pointing out that PAN members were welcome to join in. He said Mexico City "has always been the example of what Mexican society's values should be."
If so, public kissing would be high on the list. Compared with the United States, Mexico is a very smoochy place. Mexicans of all stripes kiss each other on the cheek when saying hello and goodbye. Children and parents slobber over each other with abandon. Even strangers merit a kiss; Americans might be taken aback by the Mexican custom of kissing someone on the cheek when being introduced.
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Take a walk through many public parks in Mexico City and it can feel as though you've stumbled onto Lovers' Lane, with couples in tight embrace on wrought-iron benches or entwined on the grass beneath shade trees. The capital's vast and woodsy Chapultepec Park is so well known as a make-out zone that it has a racy nickname: Chapul-tetrepo, the last part of which can be translated as, "I climb you," as one would a tree.
