{"id":740,"date":"2013-07-09T22:35:32","date_gmt":"2013-07-09T20:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/?p=740"},"modified":"2013-07-10T14:05:10","modified_gmt":"2013-07-10T12:05:10","slug":"la-manif-pour-tous-the-home-for-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/archives\/740","title":{"rendered":"La Manif Pour Tous – The Demonstration for All"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’ve been listening to Learn French in your Car<\/a> in my car, which has emboldened me to try and read French stuff on the internet.\u00a0 Doing that, I discovered I still haven’t got a clue.\u00a0 French seems to be a way of clustering prefixes and suffixes around tiny syllables so that you can talk very quickly without any English people understanding a thing, and written French is an additional coding system around that providing a set of symbols to represent the parts that nobody ever says.<\/p>\n

So with echoes of incorrectly spelled “Oe la banc?” (where is the banc?) coursing though my mind, I came across a big deal French movement against redefining marriage as something other than a man and a woman – La Manif Pour Tous<\/a>.\u00a0 This rather impressive movement has entirely escaped the attention of the English media, perhaps because they are pushing back against the irrational ideas that are being promoted from lunacy into law by liberals all over the world:<\/p>\n

The “Manif Pour Tous” is a spontaneous and peaceful grassroots movement, which, beyond any religious, partisan or gender concerns, works to preserve the unity of the equal, man-woman parentage guaranteed by French law in civil marriage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

La Manif have been following their elected representatives around since those representatives bulldozered a strange redefinition of marriage through parliament. There are pictures on the internet<\/a> of their large and (they say) entirely peaceful demonstrations.\u00a0 It seems they are getting under their skin, because the police were authorised to shoot at the crowd (you know, just in case, like one does occasionally need to shoot at crowds).<\/p>\n

They put their objections pretty well:<\/p>\n

The “Mariage pour tous” bill wreaks havoc on the Civil Code, replacing the words “husband” and “wife”, “father” and “mother” by unisex, undifferentiated terminology (notable “parents”). This bill intends to erase sexual differentiation and complementarity from the law and jeopardize the foundation of human identity: sexual difference and the resulting structure of parentage. It paves the way for a new, “social” parentage unrelated to human reality. It creates a framework for a new anthropological order founded not on sex but on gender, that is, sexual preference.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think the French have their language set up to value marriage above other relationships.\u00a0 French is pretty big on gender roles – everything is masculine or feminine – there is no “it” (pourquoi you may ask, and I don’t know).\u00a0 The label “Boyfriend” and “girlfriend” which might pass as something of an official status in English is “mon petit ami” – my little friend. Not very encouraging or official. How can you and a little<\/b> friend hope to bring up children? Children need something better than that – they need grown ups!\u00a0 They need parents!\u00a0 It was fine and well to cast off king and church, but there’s no reason to reject proper grammar!<\/p>\n

“La Manif Pour Tous” has this cool pinkish logo showing what parentage means: it means everyone has a mother and a father:<\/p>\n

\"Logo<\/a>

Logo of La Manif Pour Tous<\/p><\/div>\n

Of course, if every family had but one boy and one girl, the population would be on a rapid decline towards zero.\u00a0 This is, however, easily rectified:
\n\"La<\/a>There, I fixed it!\u00a0 We might need a bigger home for all that.\u00a0 Good thing we have that seven seater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I’ve been listening to Learn French in your Car in my car, which has emboldened me to try and read French stuff on the internet.\u00a0 Doing that, I discovered I still haven’t got a clue.\u00a0 French seems to be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[15,106,107,4,17,190],"class_list":["post-740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-stuff","tag-children","tag-french","tag-marriage","tag-politics","tag-rants","tag-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":746,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions\/746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mcgill.org.za\/stuff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}