Lessons from France on the Myths of Same-Sex Marriage

The other myth that the French pitilessly debunked was the myth of the lovable gay lobby. Since I’ve spent almost my whole life immersed in the LGBT community, I’ve known good and bad people who identify as “gay.” But the attacks of LGBT activists against people who disagree with them are matched by their willingness to subvert other people’s interests to their own. The lobby’s mistake was to try to butter up the French with the usual platitudes about love and bullying.

The French are a tough crowd. I learned this when I took to the stage at theMarch 24 manif and fielded the boos from over a million marchers at the mention of “homophobia.” They weren’t booing me, thank goodness; they were booing the idea of people accusing someone of homophobia for asking obvious questions about the logistics of surrogacy contracts for gay men like Perez Hilton. The crowd cheered me on for most of my six-minute talk. But the moment was educational.

Whereas in the English-speaking world we observe some British conventions of privacy and politeness, it is never a good idea to tell French speakers that some questions are off- limits. They are a blunt people. It’s one thing to get booed by a few hundred people in a gymnasium. It’s completely another to stand below the Arch of Triumph and hear over a million French people boo at the same time. You feel the zeitgeist with much more force. It seems like the buildings, the sky, the trees, and even the birds overhead are groaning at you. This is not a scenario that will allow you to fudge facts.

Read more at Public Discourse.