France's anti-gay La Manif Pour Tours and America's Tea Party have a number of things in common, not the least of which is their boiling homophobia and general opposition to modernity and equal rights fro all citizens. And then there's the racism - sometimes not very subtle - that is reserved for those of different skin colors. Both groups, in my view, are nasty phenomenon of what happens when white religious extremists feel that their place of privilege is eroding. A piece in The New Yorker compares the two groups in more detail. Here are article excerpts:
Last month, marchers filled the streets of Paris and Lyon to protest same-sex marriage, which became legal in France last year. The day after the demonstrations, François Hollande’s Socialist government announced that it would not be putting forward new legislation to make it easier for gay couples to adopt children or have them with the help of surrogate mothers. Although the government insisted that the decision had nothing to do with the protests, hardly anyone believes it. Hollande’s gay-rights retreat was a major victory for La Manif Pour Tous (The Protest for Everyone), the group that has organized a series of massive protests since November, 2012, when the government first introduced the gay-marriage law.
Political street demonstrations are so much a part of French life that they have their own nickname, la manif, short for manifestation, or protest. They have a long history of blocking or undoing legislation, toppling governments, and reshaping the country—sometimes quite literally.
Some in France have compared La Manif Pour Tous to the Tea Party movement in the United States. At a difficult moment in French life—with unemployment at eleven per cent, Hollande unable to gain traction, and a pessimistic public—La Manif Pour Tous has surprised political parties on the right and the left with its ability to bring people into the streets. “Our country is in the midst of an economic crisis at the same time there is a social crisis,” Ludovine de la Rochère, the president of the Manif Pour Tous, said at a recent rally. “More profoundly, we are in a crisis of meaning, a moral crisis.
While there are some common elements, the differences between La Manif Pour Tous and the Tea Party are perhaps even more interesting. Social issues—family, marriage, sexuality, homosexuality—have suddenly become highly charged in France, but they play out so differently that they illustrate what’s distinctive about France—and the U.S.—in ways that scramble many notions of left and right, conservative and liberal.
What is similar to the Tea Party is that La Manif Pour Tous emerged outside the structure of the traditional French parties—both the Gaullist U.M.P. and the far-right National Front of Marine Le Pen. As with the Tea Party, its supporters claim to represent a silent majority that is not being heard by the élites in the capital. But the Tea Party turned quickly to electoral politics, with what can be seen as either an accession to or a partial takeover of the Republican Party. “La Manif Pour Tous has gone out of its way to keep its distance from both the U.M.P. and the National Front,” Tartakowsky said. It also rejects being labelled as on the right.
La Manif Pour Tous leaders virtually never mention God or the Church, although most are observant Catholics. The French bishops have stayed in the background. Unlike their American counterparts, the French are much less comfortable with religion in public discourse. “This movement is inconceivable without Catholicism,” Tartakowsky said. “And its success is partly dependent on its keeping its religious roots out of sight.”
Fifty-seven per cent of French children are born out of wedlock (up from thirty-seven per cent twenty years ago), including the four children of President Hollande, who has never married. The new gay-marriage law, which has allowed seven thousand gay couples (many of them middle-aged) to marry, would hardly seem to be France’s biggest problem. La Manif Pour Tous supporters talk less about defending traditional marriage than about their opposition to the very idea of gay and lesbian people having children. “Every person is the product of the union between a father and a mother,” Dumont told me. “We feel that every child has a right to a father and mother.”
France has largely restricted adoption to married couples, and artificial insemination to married couples or (heterosexual) unmarried couples who can show that they have been together for at least two years. Unmarried individuals who wanted to adopt have generally had to do so outside France, then bring the children home.
It is the existence of gay marriage that has brought the question of adoption by gay couples to the forefront. While La Manif Pour Tous insists that it is standing up for common sense and the rights of children, others see simple homophobia. The group SOS Homophobie, in its latest annual report, notes a rise in homophobic incidents. “They may not be homophobes, but they are the source of an unprecedented increase in homophobic incidents recorded by SOS Homophobie,” the group’s report on 2012 states.
Opposition to gay marriage represents an important shift in right-wing politics in France, according to Éric Fassin, a professor of sociology and political science at the University of Paris VIII. During the Sarkozy years, the principal source of anxiety was immigration—in particular, Muslim immigration. Sarkozy, like others on the right, went out of his way to adopt liberal positions on social issues while portraying Muslims as unfit for citizenship because they were hopelessly misogynistic and homophobic. But the surprising strength of La Manif Pour Tous has some on the right considering new alliances.
“Under the cover of fighting against homophobia and for gender equality, they are spreading the ideology of gender theory and homosexual propaganda,” Abdallah Dliouah, a Muslim cleric, was quoted as saying in Le Monde.
The right, said Fassin, the sociology professor, “is going to have to figure out how to articulate the sexual and racial question.” It may be getting closer. Christine Boutin, a Catholic conservative within the U.M.P., who had been relegated to the sidelines for the past few years but is returning to prominence on the wave of the anti-gay-marriage protests, recently declared, “The dam between the right and the extreme right has fallen.”
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