Viva el amor: City allows public kissing

Public kissing is legal again in a Mexican city famous for its so-called Alley of the Kiss after a law outlawing it drew the public’s wrath, officials said.

The city council in Guanajuato, which means Hill of Frogs, had recently approved an ordinance banning offensive language and obscene touching in public, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

The council is led by the socially conservative National Action Party, or PAN, the newspaper noted.

Mayor Eduardo Romero Hicks said the law banned agarrones de olimpiada, which translates roughly as Olympic fondling.

But within days after the measure was enacted, the mayor of the city of about 71,000 people suspended it amid public outcry from all over Mexico.

The attitude toward kissing is a good thermometer of the tolerance of a society, columnist Federico Reyes Heroles wrote in the Reforma newspaper. Eros is part of life.

Since the law’s suspension, officials are hanging banners and printing postcards that celebrate various flavors of kissing, the Times reported.