Meet the Gay Police State

from Stand Firm by Greg Griffith

Well, it is France, but even so…

On March 24, 2013, as I stood with other speakers waiting to take the stage at Paris’s “manif pour tous” against homosexual marriage, I saw tear gas sail through the air at a crowd of peaceful protesters.

Children, elderly people, and elected officials were hit by the gas. Christine Boutin, the president of a political party, passed out. Some videos showing what happened are posted on my blog here.
As I stood behind the fence, waiting for my cue to take the stage, I was torn between two urges.

One urge was to climb the fence and show solidarity with the people being tear-gassed. The other urge was to flee. In the end, I was spared having to choose, because the organizers called for me to mount the platform and speak.

The images of a police force “defending” a city ruled by a gay Socialist mayor (Bertrand Delanoe), shooting tear gas at children, was worse than the imagery of Lt. Pike pepper-spraying college students in Davis, and worse, I would say, than the Jim Crow police force using dogs and water hoses on black children during the famous protests led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Why do I say it was worse? Look at the number of people, the sheer quantity of riot police, and the closeness of the tear gas, which is a seriously aggressive chemical agent. Christine Boutin lost consciousness and was still under medical care after inhaling the tear gas, which was why she could not attend the Washington March for Marriage two days later, as she and Frigide Barjot were both scheduled to do.

Unfortunately, Frigide Barjot also could not attend the Washington march because she had to remain in Paris to respond to press reports demonizing her movement.

The tear-gassing behind the stage in Paris came less than one week after Frigide Barjot and her small group in Brussels, including me, were greeted with a mob of over one hundred Belgian pro-gay rioters hurling insults, pressing against barricades, and physically assaulting Xavier Bongibault, as we tried to make a discreet transit from the European Parliament, where we had testified, to a theater where we were scheduled to address a crowd of French-speaking supporters.

Having spent so many years in the gay community, I found myself falling into an emotional nadir as violence marred events, both in Brussels and Paris. In both cases, it was the side militating for gay parenting that used physical intimidation: a combination of riled street thugs and armed riot police, the deadly cocktail of “unofficial” and “official” violence that characterizes the dynamics of so many police states.

When I made my way back to Los Angeles the following day, I found myself gazing at the Atlantic Ocean below me and searching for an answer to an agonizing question: how can gays accept their complicity with a police state? Are they willing to become a police state?