By Stefania Rousselle
Same-Sex Marriage and the French Family: While activists demonstrate over President François Hollande's politics, French parents debate the legalization of adoption for gay married couples.
PARIS – With a definitive vote by the lower house of Parliament, France on Tuesday became the world’s 14th nation, and the third in just two weeks, to approve marriage rights for same-sex couples.
The legislation is expected to be approved by the Constitutional Council and signed into law by President François Hollande to allow the country’s first same-sex weddings to take place this summer.
The passage of the “marriage for all” law, sponsored by Mr. Hollande, a Socialist, came after months of sometimes angry debate and a series of major protests that drew Roman Catholics from France’s rural regions and received the backing of religious leaders and the conservative political opposition. Homophobic violence had risen in recent weeks, with a handful of attacks on gay and lesbian couples reported across the country.
The left holds a strong majority in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, and the law was approved by a vote of 331 to 225, with 10 abstentions.
Opposition to the law, which also opens adoption to same-sex couples, remained strong and vocal even after the vote. Parliamentarians from the country’s main opposition party, the center-right Union for a Popular Movement, announced that they would challenge the legality of the new law before the Constitutional Council, a high court that rules on matters of constitutionality. And civil society opponents, many of whom gathered under a movement called La Manif Pour Tous, or Protest for All, said they intended to continue to demonstrate.
Police officers were reportedly stationed in the thousands on Tuesday outside the National Assembly, where opponents have held daily protests, some of which have degenerated into violent clashes with security forces.
Hundreds of thousands of opponents have demonstrated across France in recent weeks, with much of their attention focused on the law’s provision for adoption by gay couples; they denounced what they called a threat to the foundations of French society and an injustice for children who will be raised by parents of the same sex.
Backers of the legislation said it rectified an unjust and discriminatory status quo without impinging upon the rights of heterosexuals.
“It is a generous text that you’ve voted for today,” Justice Minister Christiane Taubira told legislators Tuesday evening, calling the law a “very beautiful reform.”
But there would be some precedent for the court’s rejection of a legal text prepared by Mr. Hollande’s government. In December, the Constitutional Council rejected legislation that would have created a 75 percent marginal tax rate on incomes of more than one million euros, or about $1.3 million; the legal text failed to account for the fact that French income tax is levied on households, not individuals.
Mr. Hollande’s junior minister for the family, Dominique Bertinotti, said Tuesday that the government had been careful to avoid any “legal fragility” in the text of the law. In a 2011 decision, the court found that it was not its role to rule on the legal boundaries of marriage.
Some conservative lawmakers have suggested overturning the law should they find themselves with a parliamentary majority, but it remains unlikely that they would try to do so, despite their recent vocal opposition; opinion polling has consistently shown that a strong majority of French support marriage rights for same-sex couples, though the country remains more evenly split on the matter of adoption.
