Lessons from France on Defending Marriage

from Stand Firm by Sarah

What a fascinating analysis from The Witherspoon Institute—make certain you read the entire piece:

In France, a repeating refrain is “the rights of children trump the right to children.” It is a pithy but forceful philosophical claim, uttered in voices ranging from gay mayor “Jean-Marc” to auteur Jean-Dominique Bunel, who revealed in Le Figaro that two lesbians raised him. For most of France, LGBT rights cross the line when they mean that same-sex couples have a “right” to children—something that both France’s grand rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, and Louis-Georges Barret, Vice President of the Christian Democratic Party, have refuted as a right at all.

The right to a child, according to Bernheim and Barret, does not exist; it would mean changing children, as Bernheim says, from “child as subject” to “child as object.” Bunel states in Figaro that such a shift violates international law by denying the right of children to have a mother and a father. Bunel writes:

I oppose this bill because in the name of a fight against inequalities and discrimination, we would refuse a child one of its most sacred rights, upon which a universal, millennia-old tradition rests, that of being raised by a father and a mother. You see, two rights collide: the right to a child for gays, and the right of a child to a mother and father. The international convention on the rights of the child stipulates in effect that “the highest interest of the child should be a primary consideration” (Article 3, section 1).

Bunel suggests that laws allowing gay people to create unnecessary same-sex households for unwitting children should be brought to Europe’s high court of human rights.
Homovox is a web portal for testimonials from gay men who oppose the “marriage for all” bill. Hervé Jordain, a Marseille homosexual, says on Homovox, “It is utterly abnormal to uphold one’s ‘right’ to have a child … A child is not a cute little doll you go out and buy on December 15.”

Echoing this growing sense among France’s gay men that the metropolitan movement for gay parenting has fostered a selfishness and destructive disregard for others among LGBT leaders, “Benoît,” a 43-year-old gay business owner, says, “this bill is a dupe … it is a lie, an error, a farce. It is like looking for a magic spell to say gay and straight people are the same.”

Emmanuel, a gay art historian, says bluntly, “Why must we say gay and straight couples are the same? They are not equal.” Even more eloquently, gay blogger Philippe Ariño cautions, “equality is not a good thing by itself. There are bad forms of equality. We call that conformism, uniformity, banality.” “Jean-Pier,” a bespectacled 49-year-old screenwriter, offers an even more personal admonition:

Twenty five years ago—remember, I’m 49—I truly wondered about having a child. Like everyone else, I wanted to have a child; it was a question of transmitting my heritage. But then I realized very quickly that if I were going to have a child that way, it would be for the wrong reasons. […]The desire for a child, for me, is fulfilled. I am a writer and creator. I create stories for children. That’s a way to address children and respect them. That’s an act of love for them.

As a bisexual, raised by a lesbian and her lover (read my account of “growing up with two moms” here), with decades of experience in gay American discourse, I find this dissension among France’s gays utterly inexplicable. A fellow American Thinker contributor, who is also gay and worries about same-sex parenting, admitted to me after seeing these shocking translations: “This would be unthinkable in the United States. If you were gay and said such things in America, you would be flayed alive. You’d never get published. You’d never work again.”