On the proposed French law of 'marriage for all':
Too many sophisms and not the right questions
by Silvia Guidi
Translated from the 1/30/13 issue of
The right to have a baby does not exist, but the baby has rights which legislators ought to protect. This sums up the position of Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institut de France on the proposed legislation popularly called 'mariage pour tous' (marriage for all).
[ The Institut de France is the country's national institute for arts and sciences, and is composed of five academies: the Academie Francaise, concerned with the protection and promotion of the French language; the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, generally described as the academy for the humanities and history; the Academies des Sciences; the Academie des Beaux Arts (Fine Arts); and the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, the academy which elected Joseph Ratzinger as an associate member - only Frenchmen can be full members - in 1992 to take the seat vacated by the death of Soviet Nobel-winning physicist and peace activist Andrei Sakharov.
The academy statement said it was necessary to begin with a 'calm and deep-delving' debate on such an important theme - that there has not been enough reflection on the juridical, anthropological and psychological repercussions of a reform which would mean, to begin with, the disappearance from the Code of Civil Law of every reference to the sex of the partners in a marriage.
[I will never understand how the people of Spain meekly accepted the Zapatero government's similar legislation years ago in which the terms 'husband', 'wife', 'father', 'mother', were replaced with 'Partner A', 'Partner B', 'Parent A', 'Parent B'! (OK, all you feminists: Are you going to insist that A should always be the female? Oh, I forgot, between lesbians, one has to be A and the other B.) You can't even look at those terms, let alone say them, without gagging at their utter stupidity! That's what secularists did overnight to a nation that produced Teresa de Avila, Juan de La Cruz and a constellation of great saints who were also major thinkers and writers!]
Too many sophisms under a generic sentimentalism have obscured the conceptual nodes of such a delicate question, wrote Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist, in the January 27-28 issue of
Le Monde. Sophisms which she describes as "excelling in solitary escape" and indifferent to "the codes of the global tribe", as
Le Monde itself once observed.
Heinich is prominent on the current cultural scene in France but is not easily categorized. From her vast production of scholarly articles and many interests, she can be described as an expert in unusual viewpoints from which to see the world, who has been acute in her analyses of the conventions of the contemporary mind - invisible to most because they have become so widespread - and able to unmask in such thinking all the reflexes and statements that are really empty and meaningless.
One must be careful about the use of words, Heinich reiterates, in an article entitled "Mariage gay: Halte aux sophsimes" (Stop the sophisms on gay marriage), subtitled "The discussion on the proposed law of 'marriage for all' has obscured the fact that filiation is at stake".
['Filiation' refers to the individual's direct line of descent].
Careless use of words, Heinich says, can lead, in this case, to automatically transforming - without being conscious of doing so - a desire into a right, and a non-critical acceptance of everything that is brought to our attention by an intense and continuous publicity barrage exerting a 'dictatorship of global desires'.
She says one must never lose sight of the literal meaning of what is being said, especially when such words become compressed into a slogan. What, she asks, does 'mariage pour tous' mean? "For all" can never have a literal meaning, she points out, since, to cite an obvious example, marriage ought to be prohibited - and remain prohibited - to children.
[But Ms. Heinich, can't you see the activists of these new made-up 'rights' soon extending their allow-everything mentality to that point? Their extremists already promote 'man-boy love', and presumably 'woman-girl love' (in the USA, there is an activist association called NAMBLA, for National Man-Boy Love association, that, since the 1990s, has been actively advocating pedophilia and pederasty, and the abolition of all laws about consent to sexual union) - and that's not far from advocating the legitimacy of polygamy and polyandry, of marriage between children, or marriage between a man and his dog, and similar absurdities, in the name of the right of anyone to do anything he pleases.]
"What makes the difference and what constitutes the basis of the social institution of marriage is the possibility of generating children", Heinich says, saying this is the central question, which has been relegated to the sidelines in the current discussions over the proposed marriage law.
"To consider the love between two persons and not the generation of children as the factor that legitimizes the matrimonial bond," she warns, "would allow the State to interfere in questions that do no not concern it at all, such as the affective relations and sexual relations between adult consenting persons. An undue interference which, rightly, the associations defending the rights of homosexuals have fought tooth and nail when homosexuality is sanctioned by law in any way."
The right to have a child does not exist, she underscores, unless the child is considered property which one can appropriate. And the questions that should be asked do not concern the rights of adults as much as they do the duties that adults have towards children, such as "What will be their civil status?"
[Of children adopted by gay couples?] "Will they have access to the identity of their biological parents?"
[The Italian word for 'parents' - genitori - is very exact - parents are the persons who generated you]
In an article in Le Figaro last Saturday philosopher Remi Brague
[who won one of the two Ratzinger Prizes for Theology awarded in 2012] focused on analyzing the programmatic optimism with which every juridical novelty is greeted as an advance for civilization, without ever questioning the short= and long-term consequences of such new norms.
In "Mariage homosexuel: quelle avancée?" (Homosexual marriage - does this represent progress?), Brague sees in the contemporary 'dogma of progress' a cultural relic that is a misunderstanding and distortion of Christian Providence, emptied of its profound religious significance and reduced in a metaphysical freefall to a widely-shared generic category meant to be good for all seasons.
I hope to be able to find the articles referred to by Guidi and post full translations, because the item above is more like a teaser. She does not say when and under what circumstances the Academy issued its statement; whether Heinich is a member of the academy whose article expands on the statement, or whether she wrote it entirely on her own account; and does not bother to explain what the Academy is, for readers who may not know about it - never assume your readers are omniscient! - and why its statement matters; nor, not the least, Benedict XVI's membership in that Academy, since one would hope the statement was circulated to him as to all the other members for his comments and approval before it was made public! Guidi's editors obviously did not think any of the above was at all necessary.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 30/01/2013 18:49]