One million French protest against Homosexual marriage
With two more American states legalizing unmarriage, with the Boy Scouts organization adopting a wholly unworkable compromise, with media and political figures in America throwing up their hands and throwing in the towel, it would be easy to get discouraged over marriage.
But look to France. There, the amazing “Manif pour Tous” (Demonstration for All) is growing, not diminishing, in intensity. It is a movement largely composed of young people.
For the fourth time in a year, pro-marriage demonstrators hit the streets of Paris in the hundreds of thousands. They brought together Catholics and Evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, and some atheists for marriage. They even recruited gay Frenchmen who understand that “everyone needs a mother and father.”
One of the strongest arguments made by this Manif is that for the rights of children. Not only do they have a right to a mother and father, but they have a natural right not to be treated as commodities. Because of our “Anglo-Saxon” single-minded focus on rights, we in English-speaking countries have too often focused on contending rights of adults and only of adults.
The French are boldly speaking for children. They are audacious, even. They call the practice of paying poor women to bear the babies of rich men what it truly is—womb prostitution. They regard what we call “surrogacy” as a form of human trafficking. The French have outlawed it.
The year-old government of President Francois Hollande is in deep political trouble. He and his Socialists came in a wave of hope and change. They would address the limping French economy. They would fix France’s persistent unemployment problems.
Well, the French economy is still stricken. And President Hollande’s pushing through the National Assembly a radical new law to eliminate mothers and fathers, and to permit persons of the same sex to marry is seen by millions as a cruel betrayal of his campaign promises to get the country’s economy moving again.
The President of the Republic has seen his approval ratings sliding dangerously. But he has re-doubled his efforts to abolish marriage. He understands that it is by undermining the French family that the French people will become more dependent on the State. This is the goal of all Socialists.
In America, the Obama administration seeks to replace Mother and Father with Parent 1 and Parent 2. And Mr. Obama’s appointees in the Justice Department are providing a catechism for federal workers in how to think and how to speak about marriage. These workers cannot even remain silent. They must chorus their approval of same-sex couplings. Like crickets, they must chirp.
The great Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, defied the tyranny of the old Soviet Union. He did not call on the Russian people to overthrow their Communist dictators with force, but he did say the regime cannot survive unless you “chirp.” They must think that the people actually approve of their despotism and thus, you must chirp like a cricket. Well, don’t CHIRP! That was the Nobel Prize-winning author’s advice to his Russian countrymen.
And when Solzhenitsyn wanted to tell the world the truth about Soviet tyranny, he wrote the Gulag Archipelago. In three massive volumes, he exposed Communism as “atheism with a knife at your child’s throat.” Solzhenitsyn recognized Paris as the intellectual center of the world. That’s why he launched the Gulag Archipelago in Paris.
Those books landed in the City of Light like missiles of truth. They had a massive impact in helping to demoralize the claims of the left.
And so, we, too, should look to Paris for inspiration in our fight. Our opponents here don’t use dogs and barbed wire. They don’t send us to prison, yet. (Although we at Family Research Council have been the targets of a terrorist bent on mass murder.) But they do use the Department of Justice to go after journalists and they do use the IRS to oppress conservatives.
We can speak up. We don’t have to CHIRP. And we can take inspiration from those young Frenchmen and women who are standing for the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. They are demonstrating for the future of all—truly a Manif pour Tous.
The Manif pour Tous is happy to use revolutionary imagery. Our own TEA Party raises up “Dont Tread on Me” flags. The French raise up the tricolor and march wearing Liberty caps. They’re not talking violence, don’t worry. But they are speaking of removing weak-kneed politicians from office. They are planning to challenge those on the right who fail to stand for the deepest values of their own constituents. God bless them!
Throughout the French provinces—what is called La France Profonde—we see a movement arising. It is a gathering storm, not a spent force. The rulers in Paris may have to take note.
When the news first came to King Louis XVI of the storming of the Bastille, he asked: “It is a revolt?” His attendant answered: “No, Sire, it is a revolution.”
For too long in America, in Britain, in France, the elites have ignored the people. Now, we are seeing in this Manif pour Tous a peaceful revolution—a youthful and faithful revolution. It cannot come too soon. In all our countries, the movement to end marriage is an elite movement. But the people are being heard.
In France, the young people have taken to the streets. They are well-educated and articulate. They remind us that Alexis de Tocqueville, the French genius who wrote Democracy in America, was only twenty-five when he wrote his classic work.
Like Tocqueville, most of these young French are Christian. Their uprising can inspire the world to resist the Culture of Death. They are the future of hope.
Reprinted with permission from the Family Research Council.
