Frigide Barjot
January 12, 2013
IN THE controversy over public acceptance of homosexuality, there is no comparable figure in America to Frigide Barjot, the 50-year-old French comedian and celebrity who is the organizer of the main rally against homosexual “marriage” on Sunday, a protest demonstration which has been called “La Manif Pour Tous,” or the rally for all, a play on the homosexual demand for “Marriage for All.”
The blonde Barjot, whose real name is Virginie Tellene, favors hot pink sweaters and tight jeans. She is known for her comedy acts in nightclubs and appearances with a satire collective called Jalons. According to France 24:
Jalons’ debut “happening” was a protest against the cold during the freezing winter of 1984 at the aptly-named Paris metro station Glacière [meaning “freezer”], ironically blaming the French head of state for the weather conditions with the slogan: “Ice is a killer; Mitterrand its accomplice”.
Barjot is an imposing interviewee on the subject of homosexual “marriage,” as can be seen here. The mother of two sons, she is strongly opposed to marriage and adoption rights for homosexuals. She argues that every child has a mother and father and that both man and woman are the basis of the child’s psychological world. According to The New York Times:
“To make a child, you need a man and a woman,” Ms. Barjot said. For a gay couple to become the legal parents of a child “is totally contrary to reality,” she said.
She is quite happy for gay couples to have official status and legal protections. “The problem is not homosexuality, but human filiation,” she argues — a child’s need to have legal affiliation and access to its biological parents.
Barjot describes herself as a born-again Catholic and is the author of Confessions d’une Catho Branchée, or Confessions of a Trendy Catholic. However, as Tiberge writes at Galliawatch, she has run up against the Catholic organization Civitas, which is also holding its own rally Sunday, because of statements she has made equating Catholic teaching on homosexuality with hatred of homosexuals. She also believes the subject of homosexual rights must be discussed in all schools to prevent “homophobia.”
Barjot is not the only one to try to walk this fine line between complete acceptance of public homosexuality and disapproval of homosexual marriage rights. Some homosexuals in France have publicly declared their opposition to marriage rights. They include a man who goes by the name of Jean-Marc, a mayor of a French village. The American Thinker, in a piece about French homosexuals who oppose marriage rights, quotes Jean-Marc:
One must favor what is best for the child. Nobody can deny, I believe, that it’s best for a child to have a mother and a father who love each other as best they can.
President François Hollande promised last year to ensure passage of a homosexual “marriage” bill sometime this year. The bill will go before Parliament this month.
— Comments —
Sophia writes:
My Armenian mother was brought to France as a girl and came to the U.S. as a college student, where she remained after her marriage to my father.
My siblings and I spent two summers in France visiting her relatives, who had congregated there in the years after World War I. While in no way does this qualify me as an expert on the French, let me offer a few observations:
The French have a quality of logic about them, expressed in a serious and grave fashion which is quite charming. I realize that not every Frenchman is a trained logician, but they all seem to have a gift of deductive logic that your average Englishman or American lacks.
This may be only a personal observation but I don’t think so. I have compared this with other people and they agree. Do you?
So, regarding Mme. Barjot’s attitudes towards homosexuality, her innate Gallic logic has led her to conclude that marriage, parenting and homosexuality do not mix, but that the existence of homosexuals is a given, and should be taught about in the schools. You may disagree – but you are not French.
I wish Ms. Barjot’s movement all best wishes and hope that they send this rotten gay marriage bill to the dumpster. And I hope that by doing so they contain the so-called gay rights movement. Perhaps containment is better than total annihilation. It’s their country. Maybe we can learn from an older civilization.
Laura writes:
Yes, the French do have their own distinctive philosophical bent.
Just to clarify, as I understand it, Ms. Barjot does not want schools simply to acknowledge that homosexuality exists; she wants them to teach that homosexuality is good. This is where I question her logic and sensitivity. She seems not to understand children, and their psychological formation. And in celebrating homosexuality, she seems ignorant of its hardships. If it is true that Ms. Barjot stigmatizes anyone who disapproves of homosexuality as being “homophobic,” or hateful of homosexuals, then I question her motives and thinking.
Just for the record, I never think in terms of the annihilation of all homosexual activity or desire (such a thing would be impossible), but rather the annihilation of public encouragement of harmful behavior.
Sophia writes:
Sometimes when I write something, I forget the original impetus that made me write. After I read what I wrote to you on your website (thank you) that impetus came back to me.
It occurred to me, as I read news accounts of the demonstrations in France, that France is the only, the sole, country where demonstrators point out, with simple logic, that a child is the product of a man and a woman, and that such a profound change in marriage and adoption laws, will produce children alienated from at least one biological parent, and that regardless of what we may think of the rights of homosexuals, the right of the child to a mother and a father, or proxies thereof, is paramount, else we are to fall into an abyss with no end. This is not a position based on emotion, but on cold logic.
Wondering why this was, the French penchant for logic occurred to me.
I don’t want to make too much of one person, but with respect to Mlle. Barjot, it is true that her emotions are pro-gay – but her French-inspired logical bent leads her inevitably to oppose gay marriage. That may not be where you or I want her to be, but I applaud the fact that she can separate her reasoning faculties from her emotions. I don’t agree with her on the basic subject of homosexuality, but I do agree with her about “gay marriage.” There is no one like her in the U.S. – a cultural leftist who is capable of logic.
Anyway…..that was my thought process.
Laura writes:
First, you are absolutely right that what is happening in France is unique: it’s an actual conversation about homosexual marriage. In the United States, of course, many people have pointed out the interests of children, but no liberals have done anything but pay token regard to that concern. It’s as if half the world has forgotten what it is to be a child.
Secondly, while I agree with your observations about French thinking in general, I don’t agree that what Barjot is expressing is simple logic. I think it is actually common sense and sensitivity to humanity. Common sense transcends rationality. Logically, we cannot prove that children need a connection with both a father and mother (or a surrogate father and mother), we can only appeal to our sense of what they are as human beings. That’s not logic, or it’s not only logic. It’s intuition. But I think it is part of French civility to recognize it. So what Barjot is demonstrating is not so much the reasoning abilities of the French but their sense of social order, a form of awareness that modernity has weakened considerably. The French, at their best, are highly civilized and same-sex marriage is an offense to civilization.
Robert Marchenoir writes from Paris:
It is very easy to prove with logic and reason that a child needs a mother and a father in order to grow up properly.
For how could he learn the proper way to behave for a grown-up man or woman, the proper way to work out the relationships between sexes, the proper way to raise a family, if not by watching his parents, day in, day out ?
The child of a single mother (or a single father, for that matter), or worse, a child living with a homosexual pair, will miss this crucial experience during his formative years. That loss cannot be repaired.
Laura writes:
There is a very logical case against same-sex “marriage,” and statistics amply confirm that children who are raised by only one of their natural parents due to divorce or illegitimacy have poorer life outcomes, but many people deny these realities and it is impossible to appeal to the obvious with them because their support for same-sex “marriage” is based on a stubborn concern for the desires of adults and a willful disregard for the psychology of children. They argue that children need love and attention, that’s all. Supporters of same-sex “marriage” also claim that many children are deprived of normal, two-parent homes already — as if somehow that is justification for depriving even more children of normality.
