Gay Paris Joins the Protest Against Gay Marriage

This is very, very interesting.  Excerpts:

Perhaps as many as a million people marched in Paris last Sunday and at French embassies around the world against proposed legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage in France. One of the surprises in the French campaign for traditional marriage is that homosexuals have joined pro-family leaders and activists in the effort.

“The rights of children trump the right to children,” was the catchphrase of protesters like Jean Marc, a French mayor who is also homosexual.

Even though France is known for its laissez faire attitude toward sex, pro-family leaders were quick to organize huge numbers. When President Hollande announced his intentions to legalize homosexual marriage last November, a demonstration against the proposal gathered 100,000 protesters. And then what started as a debate about homosexual rights changed to one about a child’s right to a mother and a father, and the numbers in opposition exploded and has come to include unlikely allies.

Xavier Bongibault, an atheist homosexual, is a prominent spokesman against the bill. “In France, marriage is not designed to protect the love between two people. French marriage is specifically designed to provide children with families,” he said in an interview. “[T]he most serious study done so far . . . demonstrates quite clearly that a child has trouble being raised by gay parents.”

Jean Marc, who has lived with a man for 20 years, insists, “The LGBT movement that speaks out in the media . . . They don’t speak for me. As a society we should not be encouraging this. It’s not biologically natural.”

Outraged by the bill, 66-year old Jean-Dominique Bunel, a specialist in humanitarian law who has done relief work in war-torn areas, told Le Figaro he “was raised by two women” and that he “suffered from the lack of a father, a daily presence, a character and a properly masculine example, some counterweight to the relationship of my mother to her lover. I was aware of it at a very early age. I lived that absence of a father, experienced it, as an amputation."

"As soon as I learned that the government was going to officialize marriage between two people of the same sex, I was thrown into disarray,” he explained. It would be “institutionalizing a situation that had scarred me considerably. In that there is an injustice that I can in no way allow." If the women who raised him had been married, “I would have jumped into the fray and would have brought a complaint before the French state and before the European Court of Human Rights, for the violation of my right to a mom and a dad."

A pro-family coalition that includes homosexuals is certainly different than in the United States and likely most places around the world. It is unclear why at least some French homosexuals would not only favor man-woman marriage only, but would campaign against homosexual marriage. It could be that France has allowed for civil unions, for all couples, for more than a decade. Whatever the reason, this potent coalition may stop homosexual marriage in France...

There's more here on the European situation and the debates on gay marriage. Excerpts:

...Every time Benedict XVI speaks out against marriage between homosexuals, he is immediately besieged with criticism. But the last time he did so, in the annual pre-Christmas address to the curia, this did not happen. Everybody silent.

Acting as shield for the pope was the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, whom he cited in support of his own ideas. And none of the opinionists on the other side felt like taking aim against a luminary of European Judaism, in addition to the head of the Catholic Church.

In effect, the French case is teaching a lesson beyond its borders, in the battle for and against what the Church calls “nonnegotiable principles,” central among which is marriage between man and woman.

The intention of the Hollande presidency to extend legal legitimacy to marriages between homosexuals has seen the lively reactions not only of the Catholic Church, led by the archbishop of Paris, but also of authoritative representatives of other religions and of the secular world, including the feminist philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, wife of the socialist (and Protestant) former prime minister Lionel Jospin, and, of course, chief rabbi Bernheim, with a 25-page document in which he overturns one by one the arguments in support of homosexual marriage and of adoption by same-sex couples.

In citing the manifesto by Bernheim, Benedict XVI called it "carefully documented and profoundly touching.” And with this he extracted it from its French context and offered it to the attention of the whole world.

In Italy, the pope's invitation was promptly accepted by the nonbelieving intellectual Ernesto Galli della Loggia, who in "Corriere della Sera" of December 30 not only reiterated with abundant citations the arguments of the chief rabbi, demonstrating their consistency with those of Benedict XVI, but wrote that he fully shared them and hoped that they could finally be discussed without having to bow to the reigning conformism in favor of gay marriage.

Galli della Loggia is an intellectual who has always been read with attention in the Vatican. His wife, the historian Lucetta Scaraffia, writes regularly for “L'Osservatore Romano,” and is a close friend of its director, Giovanni Maria Vian. And in fact, the newspaper of the Holy See gave great emphasis to this shift in "Corriere," as if it were the symbolic falling of a wall.

Galli della Loggia is not the first nor the only one, among secular Italian intellectuals, to have distanced himself from the chorus of accusations against the “obscurantist” Church.

After him, on January 2, also in “Corriere Della Sera,” a famous psychoanalyst, Silvia Vegetti Finzi, took a stance against the adoption of children by same-sex couples.

And before him there was the declaration of the “Ratzingerian Marxists”: the philosopher Pietro Barcellona, the theorist of operaismo Mario Tronti, the political scientist Giuseppe Vacca, the sociologist Paolo Sorbi, all of them members of the Partito democratico and previously of the Partito comunista, and all of them now converts to the “anthropological vision” of pope Joseph Ratzinger, in defense of life “from conception to natural death” and of marriage between man and woman. They held their last meeting in December in the quarters of “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the magazine of the Rome Jesuits printed with the imprimatur of the secretariat of state...

Something's going on in Europe. This is really unexpected. How will this affect the gay marriage discussion in the US? Will it affect the gay marriage debate in the US?

Some further interesting datapoints to add to the discussion. Excerpts:

...John D’Emilio, noted professor of history and pioneer in the field of gay and lesbian studies has, as a gay man and leading LGBT theorist, been vocally opposed (shown here and more recently here) to the idea of working for the legalization of same-sex marriage. He contends it is contrary to queer ideals and unjust to gays in other types of relationships. D’Emilio and our French friends are not odd outliers. Here is another and another and another and a few more and one more leading gay voices that assert the passage of same-sex marriage can actually be discriminatory and limiting. Uhm...

And more. Excerpts:

...France—the country in which a former head of state could be buried from a Catholic cathedral, with his wife and his mistress in the front pews, and no one showing the slightest discomfort with the arrangements--seems to epitomize the moral fatigue of the West. So why is the French opposition to same-sex marriage so much stronger than anything we have seen elsewhere in Europe or North America? Why has the public opposition come not only from Catholic prelates and defenders of traditional morality, but even from avowed homosexuals, who make the compelling point that they are not the same as heterosexual people?

Could it be because the French—while they are as exhausted as we all are by debates about sexuality—are always ready for an energetic debate about language and the meaning of words?

Unlike Americans, who revel in the use of slang and in the changing patterns of words’ connotations, the French expect a level of precision in their language. For nearly four centuries the Academie Francaise has been issuing authoritative rulings on the meaning of words. The French understand that a change in the meaning of a word can mean a change in the way people think and act; it is a step that should not be taken lightly. The word “marriage” has a meaning, and the French instinctively realize that if that meaning is altered, the institution itself is changed.

French proponents of same sex marriage insist that they are simply opening up the institution to homosexual couples. “Marriage for all” is their slogan. But marriage has always been open to all. A homosexual man has the same legal right as a heterosexual man to enter into a marriage—which, over the centuries, has always been understood to mean a union between a man and a woman. The government does not ask prospective spouses to demonstrate that they are sexually attracted to each other before issuing a marriage license. The state only observes what is obvious—the gender of the two partners—before determining that a legal marriage is possible.

The real debate, in France and elsewhere, has never been about whether everyone should have the right to marry. The important debate has always been about what marriage is. Words have meanings. The French, of all peoples, understand that...