WITH SSM, FRANCE TURNS CONSERVATIVE: From the New York Times

ON June 5, Stephane Chapin and his longtime boyfriend, Bertrand Charpentier, emerged from the city hall of Begles, in southwestern France, with tears in their eyes and wedding bands on their fingers. They were the first gays to live out this scene in France.

The televised ceremony, complete with demonstrators pro- and anti-, had a familiar look to Americans who since last winter have watched similar ones in San Francisco and New Paltz, N.Y. Like the mayors of those American cities, the mayor of Begles, Noel Mamere, who was also the Green Party's candidate for president in 2002, had held the wedding in violation of the law. Like his American counterparts, Mr. Mamere was accused of having staged a publicity stunt. Newspapers revealed that the couple didn't even live in Bègles, and had sold their story for 5,000 euros to the weekly magazine VSD.

But the spectacle quickly ceased to follow the American script, for it appeared that Mr. Mamere could be in real trouble. Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, a member of President Jacques Chirac's conservative party, announced he would pursue sanctions against the mayor. Dominique Perben, the justice minister, declared the marriage null and void, and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said it "would be weak not to act" in the face of such "illegal comportment."

Gay marriage may be sweeping the Western world, but in France it has brought out a conservative impulse that will surprise those used to thinking of France as a progressive counterweight to a reactionary America. While there are exceptions to this script--unlike President Bush, who promised to back a constitutional amendment to oppose gay marriage, Mr. Chirac has remained silent on the issue--France has had difficulty digesting gay marriage.

This is partly because of France's republican tradition, which is absolutist on the question of equality before the law and insists that every citizen of France be treated exactly the same. ...It is unthinkable that Mr. Mamère should confer rights in Begles that cannot be conferred in Paris (where the openly gay mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, has shown no zeal for same-sex marriage). ...

Mr. Fassin said the gay marriage debate in France has been marked by a "conservatism of the left" that uses the left's rhetoric to traditionalist ends. The 1999 Civil Solidarity Pact, for example, resembles Vermont's civil-union law, permitting shared health benefits and simplifying inheritances. But rights of adoption--a bureaucratic ordeal in France, even for heterosexuals--were not granted to gays.

That has left France in a very different position from the United States. In retrospect, Americans effectively committed themselves to gay marriage when all states except Florida permitted gay adoption. Once children enter the equation, the state must protect them as best they can, and allowing their guardians to marry takes on a logic previously absent.

France still has its options open. Even with 43 percent of children born out of wedlock, according to the demographic agency Ined, the link remains strong between marriage and a traditional idea of childbearing. Surrogate mothers, for instance, are almost unheard of in France. Medically assisted procreation is not a cultural norm. Nor is late-term abortion: In 2000, feminists won an arduous legislative struggle to raise the cutoff point for abortions from 10 to 12 weeks. (In the United States, by contrast, only the ban on what critics call partial-birth abortion, which is now blocked, restricts a woman's right to an abortion at any time in her pregnancy.) Sexual harassment is another area where the French believe American laws go too far. ...

One of the strangest outcomes of gay marriage in Begles is the way opinion in the Socialist Party--the natural home of change when it comes to sex issues--has split along gender lines. ...It is Socialist women--the regional leader Segolene Royal, former Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou, and former Labor Minister Martine Aubry--who led the opposition.

They may have been following the "differentialism" (an important strain of French feminism) associated with the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, who happens to be Mr. Jospin's wife. Ms. Agacinski has argued that the human condition cannot be understood in any universal way without reference to both sexes. This argument has been a mighty tool for left-wing reforms. It provided the intellectual underpinnings for mandating sexual parity in French legislative elections. Today, it provides the intellectual underpinnings for arguing that a marriage that lacks either a man or a woman is no marriage at all.

more
posted by Eve at 10:36 PM | link

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home