THE American media continue to provide scant news on the momentous developments in France, where opposition to the same-sex marriage law known as Taubira’s law has evolved into a mass resistance movement. On Sunday, the second “manif pour tous,” or march for all (a play on the slogan “mariage pour tous”), is scheduled to take place in Paris and, as Tiberge reports at Galliawatch, there is some possibility that the demonstrators will be banned from gathering on the Champs Elysées. According to Bloc Identitaire, the French nationalist group, the protesters will not give in. “Les Champs-Elysées appartiennent aux Français,”  — the Champs Elysées belongs to the French.

The Catholic group Civitas has departed ways with the organizers and the tone of ‘la manif pour tous,” objecting to the showmanship and vulgarity of Frigide Barjot, the former comedienne who is the main organizer. Civitas is planning a separate march in April.

Protesters from Civitas

French Spring, a new website, supports the march and unflinching opposition to the redefinition of marriage. From the site, as translated by Tiberge:

What is at stake is our identity and the future of our freedoms, our traditions, the culture of our provinces and our country. France is a family of families. The land of our ancestors is the heritage of our children. We want to transmit to them, entirely, from father to son and from mother to daughter, as did all the generations that preceded us. We are all born of a father and a mother! It is written in history, it is natural!

This is terrific. Where else is the issue openly discussed in terms of national survival?

Also, nowhere else in the West have children’s interests been as eloquently and passionately defended as in France. In January, an interview with a 66-year-old lawyer, Jean-Dominique Bunel, appeared in Le Figaro and caused a sensation. Bunel was raised by lesbians. From English Manif’s translation of the interview:

I suffered from the indifference of adults to the intimate sufferings of children, starting with mine. In a world where their rights are each day rolled back, in truth, it is always the rights of adults that hold sway. I also suffered from the lack of a father, a daily presence, a character and a properly masculine example, some counterweight to the relationship of my mother to her lover. I was aware of it at a very early age. I lived that absence of a father, experienced it, as an amputation.”

“What I offer you is a testimonial. It is not equal in value to a poll.”

When one objects to him that many children live in such a state because of divorce, he rebuts:  “Divorce does not deprive a child necessarily of its parents, who normally are given shared or alternate guardianship of the child. Especially, divorce does not replace the father with a second woman, exacerbating even more the affective imbalance, both emotional and structural, for the child. All psychiatrists ought to recognize that the latter does not depend on a woman the way it depends upon a man, and that the ideal for the child is that the two accompany each other in an equal, complementary way.

And to make things clear: “While I was a child and a teenager, I had absolutely no notion of all that and I naturally adored the two women who raised me alone and with courage. But I did not pose questions about the nature of their relationship,which I therefore did not figure out. My father, who had abandoned my mother when I was three, precisely due to the relation she was engaged in, was never around, notably when I needed him. Also I turned as much as possible to the men of my surroundings, who begged for an oversized and sometimes unhealthy place in my life.”

No comparable interview has received such prominent notice in the American press. This statement by Bunel is arresting:

“What I offer you is a testimonial. It is not equal in value to a poll.” [emphasis added]

Articles on same-sex “marriage” almost always report high numbers of people who support the idea in polls. But polls are as nothing compared to the lived experience of a single child.

—- Comments —-

Jonathan Silber writes:

A child raised from infancy by homosexuals or lesbians grows up with parents, it can be said, but without a mother and without a father, properly speaking.

So also, in fact, does a child raised by his grandparents; and whatever his good fortune of being taken in by them, he, too, must grow up in the absence of the unique psychic atmosphere– deep, mysterious, and powerful–produced by the union of a man and a woman in marriage– and only by that union–on which the normal development of a child depends.

The circumstances of a child raised by homosexuals or lesbians seem to resemble more those of an orphan. Orphans are regarded with pity, and rightly so, in recognition of the the loss they’ve suffered– irreparable–of growing up with no mother and with no father, and of the special difficulties orphans face in making their way in the world.

And it is the consciousness and understanding of those special privations and hardships undergone by orphans that make, in works of fiction, accounts of their trials and tribulations so interesting and affecting. Orphans feature prominently, of course, in the great novels of Dickens: Pip, in Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist. I for my part pity the children of homosexuals and lesbians. And I see them as victims of ignorant, malicious, depraved adults.

Laura writes:

Today’s orphans are worse off than Oliver or Pip or David Copperfield because in the nineteenth century people did not  pretend that being an orphan or a runaway was good or think that the government should set about encouraging orphanhood.

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