Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Several weeks ago some 800,000 French citizens took to the streets to protest the legalization of same-sex marriage. How can this be? Aren’t the French emblematic of secular, liberal, European values?

Why are so many of the French opposing same-sex marriage? According to Jim Daly, in his article which describes the protests, the French are arguing that same-sex marriage discriminates against children. Daly reports that the homosexual mayor of Paris has been repeating the popular mantra: “The rights of children trump the right to children.”

Daly adds:

France’s chief rabbi, Gilles Bernheim, and Louis-Georges Barret, Vice President of the Christian Democratic Party, have suggested that nobody has a right to children. If there was such a right, they argue, it would mean reclassifying children as objects, making them mere pawns.

Daly notes that Jean-Dominique Bunel, a French filmmaker, also opposes legislation to legalize same-sex marriage. Bunel, who was raised by two lesbians, deeply missed the presence of a father. Here are his comments:

I oppose this bill because in the name of a fight against inequalities and discrimination, we would refuse a child one of its most sacred rights, upon which a universal, millennia-old tradition rests, that of being raised by a father and a mother. You see, two rights collide: the right to a child for gays, and the right of a child to a mother and father. The international convention on the rights of the child stipulates in effect that “the highest interest of the child should be a primary consideration” (Article 3, section 1).

It is fascinating to realize that this very same argument has been repeatedly offered by conservative same-sex marriage opponents in the US. At last, liberals and conservatives can both rally around the common cause of children’s rights. Every child has the right to be raised by a father and a mother. Same-sex marriages guarantee that either a mother or a father will be absent in the home. Surely this is unjust.