Spectacular rally in Paris this week, with hundreds of thousands of French families and activists and even some gay groups objecting to the demolition of the meaning of marriage, and to the abolition of a child's birthright to both a mother and father. Bigger than the Grande Armee of Napoleon - let's hope it shakes the Socialist President into sanity.
Interestingly, the passion is as much, or more, about the legal right for same-sex couples to adopt or use surrogacy / IVF to obtain a child. As Jim Wallace points out in the interview linked below, if you set gay marriage laws in cultural concrete, there is no way you can disallow gay adoption and surrogacy / IVF, because marriage carries within it the intrinsic right " to found a family" - that is there in the International Declaration on Human Rights, Article 16. So the foundational reality of marriage-and-family can be vandalised by either the front door (legalising gay marriage) or the back door (legalising gay surrogacy / adoption / IVF). Legislative radicals can either subvert the form of marriage-and-family (altering its meaning to allow gay weddings) or the substance of marriage-and-family (allowing gay couples the core right and role of marriage, to "found a family" through surrogacy / adoption / IVF). Either way, the "natural and fundamental group unit of society" (in the words of the same IDHR) - man / woman / child - is defaced and will be ultimately degraded into unnatural constructions of homosexual / bisexual / polyamorous "relationships" into which children are artificially inserted. And that is why consistency in opposing gay marriage requires opposing gay (and single) adoption / surrogacy / IVF: because the whole point is defending the child's right to BOTH a mother and a father.
Below: coverage from The Australian, and also listen HERE to an interview with Jim Wallace on the Steve Price show.
ShareDemonstrators arrived in 900 coaches and seven trains from across France, many prodded into action by their priests. They converged on the Champs de Mars, by the Eiffel Tower, which was a sea of pink and blue flags, the colours of the anti-gay marriage movement.
Their figurehead was Virginie Merle, 50, a Catholic comic who uses the stage name Frigide Barjot (which translates roughly as Frigid Nutter).
She said that the plan would signal an end to traditional French life with the words "father" and "mother" replaced by "parent A" and "parent B" in the family law code. "If fathers and mothers disappear from our law books, what is going to be the effect on our psychology?" she said. "Francois Hollande must listen to us and suspend this bill."
Many protesters said their main argument was not so much with the legalisation of gay marriage as with the authorisation for homosexuals to adopt.
Vincent Marci, 28, from Bordeaux, said: "Children need a father and a mother to be properly brought up. That is what nature wanted. Why change it?" The government said there would be no U-turns despite the protest. Mr Hollande appears to be ready to back down over a proposal to make infertility treatment available to lesbian couples but Marisol Touraine, the Social Affairs Minister, said that he would press on with gay marriage.
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