Losing Its Nonchalance, France Feuds Over Gay Vows

PARIS, May 19 - Until recently, the French assumed they had solved the issue of gays and marriage in a most civilized manner.

The raw political debates and the spectacle of same-sex weddings in the United States were little more than a source of bemusement, what a Frenchman might call "a tempest in a glass of water."

After all, the French were the inventors of the Civil Solidarity Pact, a creative legal mechanism introduced in 1999 that gives all adult couples - regardless of gender or sexual orientation — many of the same fiscal and social rights as those who are formally wedded.

But that was before Noël Mamère, the leader of France’s tiny leftist Green Party and a member of Parliament, announced last month that he would defy tradition (and some would say the law) by officiating at the country’s first gay wedding ceremony.

Like many French politicians, Mr. Mamère holds multiple offices. So he is using his perch as mayor of an obscure southwest town named Bègles to conduct his social experiment, joining two thirty-something men, a supermarket clerk and a health-care worker, in marriage on June 5.

"France is a hypocritical country," said Mr. Mamère in explaining his decision. "Marriage here is traditionally considered a Judeo-Christian value, a very strong symbol organized around heterosexuality. For many, the validity of marriage is procreation. It’s an extremely archaic vision in my opinion, an idea encased in glass. The Americans are much more advanced in the fight against discrimination despite their puritanical and their slightly Protestant bent."

Mr. Mamère argues that nothing in the Napoleonic Code, the vast compilation of civil laws that has governed since 1804, specifies that marriage has to be between a man and a woman. He has also threatened to take any challenge of his action to the European Court of Human Rights, a European Union court based in Strasbourg..

His crusade has enraged the center-right French government, riven the Socialist Party and touched off a fierce intellectual battle in newspaper opinion columns and television talk shows over the rights of homosexuals in France.

"Marions-Nous" ("Marry Us"), screamed the cover headline of the most recent issue of Le Monde’s glossy weekly magazine, illustrated with the faces of two smiling men apparently lying on flowered pillows.

Justice Minister Dominique Perben has served notice that Mr. Mamère’s gay marriage will be null and void in the eyes of the French state. "To argue that sexual difference between spouses is not written into the civil code is to lie," Mr. Perben told the right-leaning daily Le Figaro.

Discrimination against gays in France was enshrined in French law until the Socialists came to power in 1981. The age of consent for heterosexual couples was 15, but 18 for homosexual couples until 1982, when the law was changed to allow all 15-year-olds the right to consensual sex.

"Police kept surveillance files on people who had sex with someone of the same gender," wrote Frédéric Martel, a French sociologist in his book on homosexuality in France, "The Pink and the Black." "Laws required civil servants and tenants to behave like ’good family men.’ And films and books were censored."

Today, for the majority of the French, even homosexual marriage is no big deal. According to a poll released this week by the Ipsos polling agency, 57 percent of all Frenchmen and 75 percent of those under 35 believe that gay couples should be allowed to marry. That compares with only 24 percent in the United States, other polls show.

Still, France is more conservative than much of the rest of Europe, far behind Denmark (82 percent) and the Netherlands (80 percent), for example, as well as Luxembourg, Sweden, Spain, Belgium. Norway, Switzerland and Germany.

The Civil Solidarity Pact initative gives couples housing rights, health and welfare benefits, the right to file a joint tax return and to inheritance.

But proponents of gay marriage insist that it is marriage-lite, an unsatisfying compromise that does not go far enough. It does not allow couples to adopt children, for example. Couples have to wait three years before they can file joint tax returns. It is sometimes difficult for a non-French partner in a civil pact to receive a residence permit or French citizenship, especially for foreigners from places like North Africa.

Lynne Petrovic, a 38-year-old American therapist, and Ségolène Rubin, a 36-year-old Frenchwoman, were joined by a civil solidary pact at the French consulate in San Francisco in 2001 and married on Valentine’s Day at San Francisco’s city hall. But they want to be married under French law largely so that they can share custody over Ms. Rubin’s biological son.

"It’s not gay marriage in the end that worries the French," says Ms. Rubin. "It’s homosexuals raising kids." But, she adds: "We’re not militants. We’re talking about a little family unit. It’s our reality."

If reality is the guide, Mr. Mamère’s gay marriage project is unlikely to go very far. Still, it has created odd fissures, particularly in the Socialist Party, which championed the civil solidarity pact in the first place.

The Socialist - and openly gay - mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, for example, has not fully embraced the idea, calling same-sex marriages "a little bit less urgent than the question of parenting."

The former prime minister and former Socialist Party leader, Lionel Jospin, has declared his opposition, writing in Le Journal du Dimanche last Sunday that that marriage is the union of a man and a woman "first and foremost" because the "duality of the sexes characterizes our existence and is the condition for procreation."

François Hollande, meanwhile, the current head of the Socialist Party, has suggested that it might be advisable to eventually change the law to allow gay marriage. "Every society should be organized on the principle of equal rights and respect," he said. "As a result, marriage should be open to everybody." He called Mr. Jospin "a free man" to "express his own opinions."

Mr. Hollande has an unusual marital arrangement himself. He and Ségolène Royal, a Socialist deputy in Parliament and the mother of his four children, have never married. Ms. Royal has only addressed the issue of gay adoption, which she opposes. As for Mr. Mamère, he seems delighted by the fuss he has stirred up. "If a provocateur is someone who advances the cause of society, then I am a provocateur," he says. "I prefer to call myself a man of courage."

Ariane Bernard contributed reporting for this article.

May 20, 2004
PARIS JOURNAL
Losing Its Nonchalance, France Feuds Over Gay Vows
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
– http://www.nytimes.com/

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