Hundreds of thousands of people have taken part in a final protest in Paris against a bill to legalise same-sex marriage and adoption.
There were scuffles and police fired tear gas as the protest spilled over onto the Champs Elysees, the avenue which runs past the president’s palace.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls said there had been dozens of arrests.
France’s Senate is due to debate the bill next month after it was passed by the lower house of parliament.
President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party and its allies dominate both houses.
Opinion polls suggest a majority of French people still support gay marriage but their numbers have fallen in recent weeks.
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March 25, 2013 at 10:29 pm
Stothes
It’s a futile protest. Marriage equality has both the support of the people and the support of the French government. It’s a bit ironic when you read the article and hear about people holding signs that say “no to gayxtremism” as if allowing a small minority to partake in the same civil contract as the majority is some sort of radical extremism.
March 26, 2013 at 10:36 am
JAMES
Perhaps a futile argument, but NBC is reporting that today’s arguments did not bode well for those in support of gay marriage. The tenor of the discussions from the Justices, as noted on the SCOTUS blog and reported by NBC’s Pete Williams, shows that they are not prepared to make a broad stroke decision. This falls in line with the vocal warnings of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who, while in support of Roe v Wade, she believes it was too sweeping of decision, too broad stroked, and she believes that the Court should be careful of doing the same with gay marriage.
It is being reported that based upon today’s arguments, the decision on Prop 8 will most likely come down to applying it to JUST California on procedural points.
The discussions from tomorrow’s hearings over DOMA will be very telling as well. In that case though, I find it so wrong that Ms. Windsor and her partner, who obviously had a sizable estate that Ms. Windsor had to pay more than $300k in estate taxes, had not properly done estate planning that would have avoided those taxes. With trusts, etc., Ms. Windsor would have been able to have avoided the estate tax, regardless of her marital status. Of course, the poor estate planning has nothing to do with the case at hand.
The tide may be changing, this much is true. But it is ironic that the wave of the tide is high in polls, but when the polls are transferred at the voting booth, its not quite the same. In our state, as a marriage definition initiative was on the ballot, all polls indicated overwhelming support for gay marriage, but when the ballots were cast, there was a complete reversal of what the polls had shown, and marriage remained between a man and a woman.
June will be interesting.