Politics
The charged eel in French politicians' hands
Published 04 December 1998
The idea of gay marriage has driven Parisians on to the streets
In his homosexual novel Maurice, E M Forster has a doctor advise the tortured hero to move to France. "The English," the doctor observes, "are disinclined to accept human nature." Oscar Wilde had crossed the Channel for the same reason years before. One might therefore suppose that the French have little problem sorting out homosexuality's place in society. Alas, it is not so. Legislation introducing gay marriage (or a form of it) to give gay and lesbian couples legal status in today's France has created severe fault lines. It has driven people out on the streets - and we all know what can happen when the French take to the streets. State-endorsed sexual liberalism wasn't meant for France after all.
Forster was right, though. The French are easier about homosexuality than we are. Since shame is largely absent, "outing" offers no cruel media sport - particularly not in politics. Given that homosexuals seek entry in disproportionately high numbers to the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration, where France breeds its leaders, there are most likely gays in Lionel Jospin's centre-left government, as there most likely were in the conservative government that preceded it. This is cause for wry speculation only in the sense that who is sleeping with whose wife may rate the odd wink.
I suspect the French themselves are surprised, then, at the hash they are making of extending the state's official blessing - and thus financial and legal perks - to steady homosexual partners. Marriage proper, conducted by a tricolour-sashed mayor, is no longer envisaged, though that was the original idea. The new statute has been slipping this way, that way, and back again like a charged eel in politicians' palms. A streak of political correctness in Jospin requires that the advantages accorded to gay couples be open to unwed hetero couples, too.
This rival to traditional marriage now looks a very large creature indeed. It goes by the tender name "civil solidarity pact", giving the acronym "pacs" in French. Around five million people in France live together as unwed partners, the majority of them heteros who, remarkably, produce 30 per cent of France's children. Start rewarding live-in lovers with pacs goodies - tax allowances, social benefits, housing rights and inheritance favours that have hitherto benefited married couples alone - and you inescapably challenge the concept of traditional marriage, quite apart from costing the exchequer billions.
Not all the financial and legal advantages of marriage proper are on offer. Gay pacsers, for example, aren't authorised to adopt children. But, like soft-drink fanciers who prefer something less than the real thing, coming French generations might well prefer the taste of this "marriage light". Originally conceived to meet gays' social aspirations, it now looks like catering to just about everybody with a tingle in the groin who wants steady company. What is more, this knot is extremely easy to untie. One member of a pacsing couple has only to notify a court to repudiate the contract.
Predictably, conservatives and all number of traditionalists from Catholics to Muslims are up in arms. The pact is "the destroyer of marriage", "a law against moral laws", "the death of the family", "a return to barbary" and so on. The other day, while tens of thousands of anti-pacs demonstrators held the streets in Paris, the filibustering conservative opposition in parliament so decked the law with amendments (550 for the first article alone) that a vote of passage became impossible. If its loudest opponents hadn't represented the most reactionary forces in France - Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, the fiery-eyed Philippe de Villiers' right-wing nationalists and the Opus Dei squad - the prime minister might have considered a retreat. Still, Jospin knows something has gone wrong. He has decided to let passions cool.
It may now be a year before the pacs is voted through in final form. Straining to be logical and fair to everyone, the government has thus far produced an avant-garde statute that is also bloated, top-heavy and most likely unworkable. The intention behind it is laudable: to grant gays the kind of dignity under the law that heteros enjoy. The trouble is that it blurs this objective.
France's best bet is to narrow down participation in "marriage light" to gays, but logic, an old French enemy, stands in the way. Perhaps Forster's hero might still be better off moving to France, except that these days he would find things about as confused as they are at home.
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