The interest of the entire society, through its social order—its
symbolic order
—seems threatened by a non-traditional concept of family, i.e. the possibility that a child could have two fathers or two mothers. It seems difficult for some to think of parentage as separate from conception; to think of it based on commitment and responsibility and no longer on biological plausibility. The terms of father and mother are always represented as players in reproduction, even in adoption scenarios. Those who do, like sociologist Irène Théry, observe that only biological signifiers can identify a man as father and a woman as mother, dismissing the possibility of gay legal or social parentage. Psychoanalyst Corinne Daubigny fears that the adoption of a child by a gay couple would trigger the anger of the child’s original parents for having given him or her up in the first place, which Daubigny blames on laws which allow gay adoption.
The Deeds
Beyond rhetoric, there were also deeds that were issued forth which served to discriminate against gays and lesbians who either are already parents or wish to become so. We can find evidence of this in three types of decisions.
First, decisions linked to the exercise of parental authority. The 1993 French law on parental authority sets out a joint exercise of parental authority in case of separation. Such being the case, when one of the parents is gay, at best the judge will hesitate to assign the child’s principal residence to the gay parent; at worst, the judge will decree that visits between the child and the gay parent occur in the presence of a third party. Certain rulings on visitation rights are accompanied by restrictive conditions, such as prohibiting the child from being in the presence of the partner. On this subject, it is interesting to note a paradox: a gay father without a partner may be at risk of being seen as unstable, leading a nightlife that is incompatible with family life; at the same time, a gay father with a live-in partner for a number of years, which should be seen as more reassuring, is also perceived negatively.
Then there are decisions linked to the agreement to adopt. France’s law on adoption, in place since 1966, allows married couples or any person who is at least twenty-eight years old to seek an agreement in order to adopt a child. The General Council must make inquiries to insure that the candidate satisfies conditions from a psychological, emotional, and educational point of view. The law does not specify that the candidate, if not married, must live alone or what his or her sexual preferences must be. The Council of State attempts to limit decisions made by the General Council that it finds arbitrary; for example, it has been known to intervene and reject applications based solely on the person’s unmarried status. But this has a different meaning, given that sexual orientation is not mentioned, when the applicant is openly gay. “Lifestyle choice” and the absence of the other sex are calculatingly evoked in order to justify refusal, even if the candidate “possesses sure human and educational qualities” (Mangüé, State Council, October 9, 1996). As lawyer and philosopher Flora Leroy-Forgeot wrote, the refusal to give serious consideration to adoption applications by gays and lesbians is an essentially political act. Their competencies are never challenged, even though there is an implied parallel between homosexuality and an inability to parent. For authorities, the link between homosexuality and the denial of adoption rights is always done through categorization. Those who process adoption applications deny this, insisting that the applicant’s homosexuality is not an issue, while at the same time basically evoking it as the motive for refusal, going so far as to specify that “to concede that the legality of the refusal of agreements in the present case hearkens back to the implicit yet necessary condemnation of all adoption requests from gay persons to failure” (Mangüé, State Council, October 9, 1996). This situation creates a real vicious circle. Gays and lesbians know that if they want to have a family by adopting, they will have to conceal their orientation. Social services know it, and suspect that any applicant who is not married may be homosexual; and certain French politicians, like Renaud Muselier, want to prohibit adoption by applicants who live with a person of the same sex. (Such legislation, if it is adopted, would automatically lead to violations of
privacy
.) Forced to say “I” when they are really “we,” gays and lesbians who wish to adopt a child as a couple cannot count on the help of social workers and other authorities. Belgium has a very different point of view, however. Psychologists who investigate requests by lesbian couples for artificial insemination take into account the couple’s stability, and the way each partner handles her homosexuality in relation to society and her own family, as favorable criteria for parenting.
Finally, there are decisions related to adoption of a partner’s child, or so-called stepchild adoption. In the past, such adoptions were only possible for married heterosexual couples, but these requirements are being filtered out as more and more countries grant full adoption rights to homosexuals. In France, adoption law nevertheless allows a person who raised a child to adopt him or her if the birth parents consent to it and if the child, if older than thirteen, equally consents. In this situation, the adoptive parent is added to the original parentage, but parental authority is transferred solely to the adoptive parents. Such an adoption, designated elsewhere by the phrase “adoption by the second parent,” may constitute a solution that would entrench the relationship between a child and his or her legal parent’s partner. One could think that such a device, when all stakeholders consent, does not present particular difficulties. In reality, however, its success depends in large part on the personal (and possibly homophobic) convictions of the judge overseeing the case. In 2000, a woman requested to adopt her partner’s child, whom they had raised together since birth; the child, of full age, wished for this adoption as did his mother. There was no other parent who could oppose it. But the judge ruled against this child having two mothers (High Court, Colmar, June 28, 2000) based on the rationale that adoption would be diverted from its purpose. On appeal (Administrative Court, Colmar, February 16, 2001) the ruling was reaffirmed on the rationale that “in the actual state of French society, the family model of reference is the couple constituted by a man and a woman.”
Jurisprudence
reveals that the personal opinion of judges, whether homophobic or not, is part of the issue.
Notwithstanding, PaCS has paved the way for a remarkable evolution in France. The same-sex couple acquired “freedom of the city” status in Paris (akin to the key to the city). The traditional family model has integrated the reality of gay families more and more. One political party, the Greens, has endorsed propositions of the Association des parents gays et lesbiens (APGL), particularly adoption by common-law couples (whether gay or straight), and status for social parents. In response, we are seeing a stiffening of General Counsels for whom sexual orientation becomes a sufficient reason to refuse applications to adopt.
In February 2002, in the legal case of
Fretté v. France
(whereby a gay man, Philippe Fretté, sued the government of France after his adoption application was turned down when he revealed in an interview with a case psychologist that he was gay), the European Court of Human Rights refused to condemn France for violation of Sections 8 (right to personal and family privacy) and 14 (prohibition of discrimination) of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights. Even though the decision was close (four against three), it has been used as a cautionary note for those prospective gay adoptive parents who would disclose their homosexuality during investigations. On June 6, 2002, the same day that the Council of State was confirming its decision in the Fretté case, Sweden and the Canadian province of Quebec were integrating the rights of same-sex couples into their adoption laws.
New family law provisions are thus essential; more and more scholars and family professionals are convinced of the need to legally define notions of parenthood that go beyond the boundaries of biological reality. These reforms will have to allow for provisions based on the ethics of responsibility and not merely blood relationships. In order to take into account all potential forms of family—whether it be traditional, blended, gay parent, single parent, or foster—it will have to enlarge its definition of parent. In order to do that, it will have to encompass three aspects of the parental structure: biological, with knowledge of a child’s origins; legal, which gives a child a genealogical inscription distinct from the biological; and social, which allows a child to maintain ties with the people who raised him or her. Making equal space for these three aspects would be in the best interests of all children.
—Martine Gross
Anatrella, Tony. “A propos d’une folie,”
Le Monde
(June 26, 1999).
Association des parents gays et lesbiens.
Petit Guide bibliographique à l’usage des familles homoparentales et des autres
. Paris: APGL, 1997.
Borrillo, Daniel, Eric Fassin, and Marcela Iacub.
Au delà du PaCS
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999.
Daubigny, Corinne. “Le Couple homosexuel et la tentation de l’adoption,”
La Croix
(June 13, 2001).
Coursaud, Jean-Baptiste.
L’Homosexualité entre préjugés et réalités
. Toulouse: Les Essentiels Milan, 2002.
Gross, Martine, ed.
Homoparentalités, etat des lieux
. Paris: ESF Editeur, 2000.
Héritier, Françoise. “Privilège de la féminité et domination masculine,”
Esprit
(March–April 2001).
Korff-Sausse, Simone. “PaCS et Clones, la logique du même,”
Libération
(July 7, 1999).
Leroy-Forgeot, Flora.
Les Enfants du PACS, réalités de l’homoparentalité
. Paris: L’Atelier de l’Archer, 1999.
Minot, Leslie. “Conceiving Parenthood: Parenting and the Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People and Their Children.” A report of the International Gay and Lesbian Rights Commission (2000).
Nadaud, Stéphane.
L’Homoparentalité, une chance pour la famille?
Paris: Fayard, 2002.
Patterson, Charlotte. “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents: Summary of Research Findings,”
Lesbian and Gay Parents: A Resource for Psychologists
. American Psychological Association (1995).
Rihal, Hervé. “L’Intérêt de l’enfant et la jurisprudence du Conseil d’Etat concernant les agréments en matière d’adoption,”
RD sanit. Soc
33, no.3 (1997).
Sibony, Daniel. “PaCS: cette homo-famille qui gene,”
Libération
(October 30, 1998).
Théry, Irène. “Différence des sexes et différence des generations,”
Esprit
(December 1996).
Winter, Jean-Pierre. “Gare aux enfants symboliquement modifies,”
Le Monde des débats
(March 2000).
—Adoption; Anti-PaCS; Discrimination; European Law; Family; Heterosexism; Jurisprudence; Marriage; Pedophilia; Sterility; Symbolic Order.
PASOLINI, Pier Paolo
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), Italian director, screenwriter, essayist, poet, critic, and novelist, was without a doubt the first intellectual in his country to consciously make his way into the mass communication world of postmodern culture. He was one of the rare artists of his time who was able to pursue his craft without having to abandon his integrity, ideological radicalism, or authority. Regardless of what can be thought of his political positions, it must be said that, well before any of his peers, and without any cynicism, Pasolini knew how to take advantage of particular popularity of newspapers and television—representing for the first time a “mass” public, to express his own truth; a truth that was in large part incompatible with that normally represented by the
media
of the time, or even today. But this same media demanded a price for Pasolini’s transgressions, making him out to be a “case,” a “phenomenon,” and a “
scandal
,” by trying to simplify in the extreme his subversive vocation and reduce it to a “difference”
a priori
pathological, to be cured or punished.
Pasolini’s homosexual identity and the social condemnation that he provoked certainly played a major part in his relationship with the public, which can be described as that between a man who was dedicated to a critical and transgressive performance, and a public that was largely desirous of exorcising this transgression. From 1949, well before he became a celebrity, Pasolini decided to no longer hide his sexual orientation. More importantly, at a certain moment, this “perverse” desire became a decisive element of his art, a recurring and sometimes central theme (be it in the films
Orgia, Teorema
, or
Petrolio
), but also, and more subtly, an ideological crux that is present in all his work, aligning it to his biography and giving it meaning. For Pasolini, homosexuality was not a mark of difference in relation to others, but rather the sign of a radical opposition to others: “Pasolini always preferred
Otherness
to
Difference
,” said Italian literary critic Carla Benedetti. Without limiting himself to simply demanding dignity and equal rights for gays and lesbians, and even, more often than not, by ignoring these aspects (considered useless or vain) gay consciousness was at work at the heart of his reasoning: it informed any views he expressed, and thus, for those with whom he spoke, it was a fundamental idea, impossible to put aside or bypass. For Pasolini, he knew it: “What they have always condemned was not so much the homosexuality as it was the writer for whom homosexuality could not be used as a method of pressure, of blackmail, to make him toe the line. In reality, the scandal stemmed not only from the fact that I did not silence my homosexuality, but also from the fact that I totally refused to be silenced.”
It is most definitely the central character of the “perverse” desire in Pasolini’s action that explains why homophobic features, both obvious and veiled, so often surfaced in the legal saga that accompanied him his entire life, and even after his death. With regard to the very violent and numerous assaults committed on him by hoodlums (so many in fact that, at one point, Pasolini no longer even bothered to report them), homophobia was expressed in a classically
fascist
manner, as attested to by the violent attack that occurred in the Barberini movie theater in Rome during the premiere of his 1961 film,
Accatone
, accentuated by punches, screams of “bastard!”, and the throwing of vegetables, specifically fennel (
finocchio
), upon which newspapers commented, “The message was perfectly clear.” (The term
finocchio
is the Italian slang equivalent to “fag,” and makes historical reference to the act of throwing fennel seeds at the feet of those condemned to the pyre in order to mask the smell of burning human flesh.)