He defended Education Minister Vincent Peillon on Saturday for urging Catholic schools, which teach about one-fifth of all pupils in France, to stay neutral in the debate.
Peillon's supporters and critics dominated the headlines and airwaves on Sunday, a week before a Church-backed protest in Paris that organizers say could draw as many as half a million people opposed to any change in traditional marriage.
The shrill polemics could not drown out another big news story, the growing unpopularity of Hollande and his government. One poll said 75 percent of voters doubt he can keep a New Year's promise to turn around rising unemployment this year.
Laurent Wauquiez, a former conservative higher education minister, slammed Peillon for implying that Catholic opposition to the reform was responsible for suicides of gay teenagers.
"This is a big political manipulation," he said.
Conservatives also cried foul because government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem was filmed in a state school last October praising the marriage reform as progress towards more freedom.
Opinion polls show up to 60 percent of the French back same-sex marriage, which the government plans to legalize by June, and just under 50 percent support adoption rights for gays.
A new poll said 69 percent wanted a referendum on the issue, which all main religions here - Catholic, Muslim, Protestant, Jewish and Orthodox Christian - have opposed.
SECULAR RALLYING CRY
Peillon triggered the row by saying the director of Catholic education system, heavily subsidized by the state, was wrong to urge his schools to discuss same-sex marriage with pupils.
"This education system, which is under contract to the state, should respect the principle of neutrality and the freedom of conscience of all," he stated in a letter to regional education officials who oversee both state and private schools.
These officials should scrutinize the Catholic debates and report any anti-gay views aired in them, Peillon said, urging extreme caution on this issue because young homosexuals were five times more prone to suicide than heterosexual youths.
Hollande backed him in the name of "laicite", the legal separation of church and state that is a secular rallying cry for French opposed to any religion in the public sphere.
"Laicite is a principle of the Republic," he said.
Religious leaders have encouraged people to join next Sunday's protest but most will not march themselves.
Opponents of the new law caught its supporters off guard in November when they brought about 100,000 out in Paris for what was meant as a warm-up to the protest in a week's time.
The protest will converge on the Eiffel Tower and include people from all over France, organizers said.
Although few in traditionally Catholic France attend Mass on Sunday, the Church can still rally crowds larger than most political protests when its core interests are threatened.
Passing the law would make France the 12th country around the world to legalize same-sex marriage. It is already allowed in Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden.
In the United States, Washington, D.C. and nine states have legalized it, three of them in last November's elections.
(Editing by Louise Ireland)
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1 comment:
Very interesting.
Note, firstly, the ministers mumblings about "freedom of conscience". The ghosts of Vatican II rise from the depths, that troubled Council which pronounced so strongly about the individual's freedom of conscience. And this is where the Council teaching has brought us. But will anyone in the Vatican, busy celebrating the 50th anniversary of that mess, even take notice?
Then there is the time-honored masonic demand of "laicite": all nations must bow down to this principle of a completely non-religious State...very funny, since the abolition of religious influence in the State is quickly followed by the religion of masonry taking its place, which it has.
One really does wonder when the Church will awaken from its Vatican 2-induced coma and start seeing the results of their efforts to be open to the world.
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