If the recent French mobilizations against same-sex marriage have
taught us anything, it’s this: The LGBT lobby has misrepresented its
cause’s relationship to time and history. Illinois Democrat Greg Harris stated in a National Public Radio piece what the lobby has been claiming for years:
Folks know this will be a vote that
history will remember . . . And I think a lot of folks are deciding
they’re going to want to be remembered on the right side of history.
The proponents of same-sex marriage like polls. A Gallup poll published in mid-May showed public support for their cause rising from 27 percent in 1996 to 53 percent this year. Pew’s survey data
reflect a more modest rise, from 35 percent in 2001 to 49 percent in
2013, but the upward march is still clear. In April 2013, the Williams Institute
published a state-by-state analysis that reflected a steady growth in
the number of states, such as New York, in which more than 50 percent of
respondents supported same-sex marriage.
Less often mentioned are certain caveats in all these polls. For
instance, in Gallup’s poll respondents were asked to choose between
supporting or opposing same-sex marriage, without being offered a third
option such as civil unions. The data from the Williams Institute show
that liberal California is still only at 50 percent for same-sex
marriage, perhaps because the state has domestic partnerships already.
Minnesota residents only supported same-sex marriage by 43 percent,
despite their popular vote to reject a constitutional ban in 2012 and
despite the legislature’s hurried process of legalizing it in the state.
Nevertheless, two assumptions have determined the way pundits have interpreted these data.
One assumption is that the increase in support will be consistent over time rather than fickle. We can name this the Inevitability Assumption, a quasi-Marxian or at least Hegelian view that History is beckoning in one direction and there will be no turning back.
The second assumption is that more people accept same-sex marriage
because they have more reliable information about what it entails. This
is the Enlightenment Assumption, the notion that there is a
transcendental benevolence in same-sex marriage, which can rely on the
good and the true, if not the beautiful, to be vindicated by the
diffusion of knowledge.
A recent piece in the Los Angeles Times
offers a digestible version of the Enlightenment Assumption: “Knowing a
gay person is a key factor in rising support of gay marriage.” The
example of Ohio Senator Rob Portman is Exhibit A for this line of
reasoning: All Portman had to do was put a face on the issue, in the
form of his gay son’s visage, to be persuaded to the cause.
If we combine the Inevitability Assumption and the Enlightenment
Assumption, the resulting concoction is the message that predominates in
American propaganda: Gay marriage is on the right side of history
because history will take us in only one direction, based on the most
fundamental of human goods: knowledge of the truth.
Assumptions and Fallacies
These assumptions are in fact fallacies. More than any other
populace, the French have laid them bare with their four massive
“manifs” or mobilizations (November 17, January 13, March 24, and May 26).
These four mobilizations are credited as the largest mass uprising in France since the famous revolts of May 1968.
As many as 60 percent of French respondents supported same-sex marriage
in the fall of 2012, but the level of support now hovers around only 39 percent,
with 54 percent supporting “civil unions” only. It is no wonder that
the French government has had to shield itself and its LGBT benefactors
from outrage with an increasingly totalitarian modus operandi
encompassing tear gas and other familiar police-state tactics.
The French resistance to same-sex marriage has demonstrated that an
ostensibly progressive nation that had little issue with homosexuality
as a moral question can change its mind, not based on ignorance of reality, but based on knowing more about what same-sex marriage really means.
Sorry, LGBT lobby, the French are sending your soufflé back to the kitchen.
The French had little issue with the PACS,
or domestic partnerships, passed in the 1990s. The nation is not a
die-hard right-wing country, as we know from the fact that Socialists
took over the government in 2012.
Yet millions of French citizens stormed the streets of Paris and
dozens of other cities to block same-sex marriage. Despite attempts by
the international press to paint the “Manif pour Tous” and the “French Spring”
as a band of intolerant Catholic reactionaries, polls show that a
comfortable majority of the French people share their view of the
same-sex marriage law, even if some within that majority are not eager
to join in the street protests.
The drop in support for same-sex marriage came with education and
broader public debate. As the French knew more gay people individually
and learned more about the ramifications of their legalized marriage on
the community at large—especially children and poor communities overseas
targeted for adoption and surrogacy—they liked the idea of same-sex marriage less and less.
The text of the law that passed bears the scars of a public backlash.
For instance, both insemination rights for lesbian couples and
gestational surrogacy rights for gay men had to be scrapped by President
François Hollande’s government because of their horrendous
unpopularity. (Both insemination and surrogacy are subject to broader
bans in France than in the United States.)
Adoption was included in the final bill that went through the French
parliament, over the strenuous objections of adoptees of all stripes,
ranging from a fifteen-year-old writing in Boulevard Voltaire to Cyril Langelot to Benoît Talleu, an eloquent Franco-Vietnamese teen who addressed 700,000 French marchers on January 13.
Benoît’s adoptive father, Franck Talleu, was inexplicably arrested
two and a half months after his son’s famous speech. Police detained
him for wearing a sweatshirt with the children’s rights blazon on it.
The arrest was widely viewed in France as proof that the Hollande regime
had to employ invasive practices to cover up the unpopularity of its
pro-LGBT proposals.
While same-sex adoption survived massive protests, its chances are
going to be rather slim because of the long waiting list of heterosexual
couples looking to adopt. Since France’s public controversy, now Russia has refused to authorize any more adoptions into the country and India
has blocked surrogacy by same-sex couples. It will be more difficult
for same-sex couples to mask their purchase of babies through surrogates
abroad as international adoption.
The French attorney general Christiane Taubira
tried to skirt the French ban on surrogacy with a memo allowing the
government to treat overseas babies conceived by surrogate mothers as
adoptees eligible for citizenship. Instead of quiet acquiescence to this
sleight, she sparked mass protests against the merchandizing of women’s wombs. The shocking turn in the Washington Post, with an unprecedented column criticizing surrogacy by Kathleen Parker,
might be evidence that the French street revolution set off a chain
reaction that eventually brought even a super gay-friendly American
publication like the Post to face the grim business behind same-sex parenting.
The French government’s attempts to scrub these controversial aspects
of the same-sex marriage bill quietly didn’t work. As the public
contemplated the problems with sperm banking and surrogacy, they grew
increasingly suspicious of everything the LGBT lobby was promoting about
its “families.” This happened despite all the assurances from
Hollande’s ministers that the marriage bill would not lead to a boost in
artificial reproductive technology.
Fallacy #1: The Inevitability Assumption
France proves that no opinion trend on any graph can be taken for
granted as perpetual. In the United States we knew this already; we
simply weren’t aware that we knew it. We know from the abortion debate
that what seems like a steady march of acceptance can actually grind to a
halt or reverse.
The Gallup polls on abortion
show how unpredictable the trends in opinion can be, for the number of
“pro-choice” Americans peaked in 1996 at 56 percent, then declined to 45
percent today, while pro-life opinion gained significant ground, albeit
in fits and starts (only 33 percent of Americans were pro-life in 1996,
compared to 48 percent today).
If we take a step back and examine how the international LGBT lobby
has fought for same-sex marriage, we see that the lobby’s leaders must
be equally aware that nothing is inevitable about acceptance of same-sex
marriage, regardless of what they say publicly. Rather than patience,
haste has characterized their tactics.
It would not be necessary to push the case for same-sex marriage so
fervently in the Supreme Court if the electoral victories in Maine,
Washington, and Maryland were truly confidence-inspiring signs of the
movement’s inexorable march toward mass public approval. Nor would it
have been necessary for the lobby to rush same-sex marriage through the
Minnesota legislature when polls showed that fewer than 45 percent of the state’s voters really wanted to redefine marriage.
In France, the same sense of haste was also evident. Debate was
noticeably cut short by the government. During the hearings leading up
to the introduction of the bill in Parliament, only religious groups
were invited to express objections. On February 15, 2013, when 700,000 petitions
were presented to the nation’s Economic, Social and Environmental
Committee (CESE) asking for full research into the impacts of the
same-sex marriage bill, the French government committed a possibly
unconstitutional act and deemed the petitions “unacceptable.”
The process of passing the law also quickened. The vote in the Senate
was held ahead of schedule and only conducted with a show of hands, so
that it was impossible to record which parliamentarians voted for the
law and which voted against it.
Fallacy #2: The Enlightenment Assumption
Rather than maximize people’s access to information about the impact of same-sex parenting, the lobby has sought to suppress journalistic and academic
investigations into areas such as surrogacy, which give people pause
with time and reflection. While it is impossible to know the inner
thoughts of people running advocacy groups, it is reasonable to conclude
that they opt to force same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting through
the legislatures and courts at lightning speed, before people have the
chance to stop and think about what they are signing up for. (The recent
examples of California and Illinois are telling; in both states the
large number of people who have gay friends did not lead to easy passage
of same-sex marriage, but rather may have triggered a backlash
resulting in California’s Proposition 8 and the failure of same-sex
marriage last week in the Illinois legislature.)
The other myth that the French pitilessly debunked was the myth of the lovable gay lobby. Since I’ve spent almost my whole life immersed in the LGBT community, I’ve known good and bad people who identify as “gay.” But the attacks of LGBT activists against
people who disagree with them are matched by their willingness to
subvert other people’s interests to their own. The lobby’s mistake was
to try to butter up the French with the usual platitudes about love and
bullying.
The French are a tough crowd. I learned this when I took to the stage at the March 24 manif
and fielded the boos from over a million marchers at the mention of
“homophobia.” They weren’t booing me, thank goodness; they were booing
the idea of people accusing someone of homophobia for asking obvious
questions about the logistics of surrogacy contracts for gay men like
Perez Hilton. The crowd cheered me on for most of my six-minute talk.
But the moment was educational.
Whereas in the English-speaking world we observe some British
conventions of privacy and politeness, it is never a good idea to tell
French speakers that some questions are off- limits. They are a blunt
people. It’s one thing to get booed by a few hundred people in a
gymnasium. It’s completely another to stand below the Arch of Triumph
and hear over a million French people boo at the same time. You feel the
zeitgeist with much more force. It seems like the buildings, the sky,
the trees, and even the birds overhead are groaning at you. This is not a
scenario that will allow you to fudge facts.
Hence in France, the average person’s instinct is to ask the
questions and draw the comparisons, which Americans consider taboo for
the same-sex marriage movement.
They ask: What kind of crazy country wants to erase gender? The answer: Sweden, where mental illness has skyrocketed since the imposition of gender theory in schools.
They ask: Where the heck are lesbians going to find sperm for a baby? The answer: sperm banks, which are coming under fire from the adult children of anonymous sperm donors, including Alana S. Newman,
who testified against homosexual fertility subsidies in California. As
it turns out, knowing who one’s father is matters more than same-sex
parenting peddlers care to acknowledge.
They ask: Isn’t gestational surrogacy a lot like the historical
abuses that human beings committed during the times of slavery—buying
and selling people, removing children from their heritage, in order to
satisfy an adult consumer desire? The answer: Yes, and let’s not forget eugenics and cultural genocide.
During my time in France, shuttling around with Frigide Barjot and
other leaders of the marriage movement, I felt transported to an
alternate universe. I suppose that is what “French” is—an alternate
world crafted through language. It’s a world where truths aren’t bucked
and disguised so easily, a world where arguments aren’t ever settled,
and claims to a “consensus” invite people to riot. Strangely, the home
country of Roland Barthes, author of the famous book Mythologies, is
not an easy habitat for political myths like the Inevitability
Assumption and the Enlightenment Assumption. France has sneezed—will
America catch cold?
