France and the U.S. are both undergoing social democratic
onslaughts. That only intensified after last year’s elections. The
difference, mes amis, is that French conservatives are
putting up some surprisingly spunky resistance. The American middle
class, by contrast, appears to be rolling over and going back to
sleep, passively agreeing with the ineffable Chris Matthews, who
exulted shortly after last November 6, “Legalized pot and gay
marriage, is this a great country or what?”
Some time back a certain Mitt Romney cautioned that, “unless we
take action, we’ll end up being the France of the 21st century.”
The fashionable complaint became that we were looking more like
France every day. Look again. On a number of big issues from soft
drugs, to taxation, to same sex marriage, we’ve already become more
liberal than France. The trend is clear: trillion-dollar budget
deficits, a Social Security system going broke, government spending
at some 40 percent of GDP — only a few points less than in the euro
zone — one in seven Americans on food stamps, and ever more
dependent on big government. Only visible difference is that
liberal social democracy is developing willy-nilly in the U.S.,
whereas in France, for better or worse, it’s systemic. The Obama
administration is working on that.
Take legalizing marijuana. Since last November citizens in
Washington state and Colorado can merrily light up a joint, and
federal law criminalizing it be damned. While the Justice
Department tries to decide what action to take, “the Berlin Wall of
pot prohibition seems to be crumbling before our eyes,” as
Rolling Stone happily reports. With some
58 percent of Americans favoring legal marijuana and Barack
(“We’ve got bigger fish to fry”) Obama signaling flexibility, the
way is open to a chaotic nationwide patchwork of legal pot. If it’s
not available in one state, a short trip next door will be all
that’s needed to stock up. Several other liberal Left Coast states,
plus some like Minnesota and Rhode Island, appear likely to follow
suit soon, while the District of Columbia is opening its first
medical marijuana dispensaries.
But leave your weed at home if you’re going to France. French
law strictly prohibits the possession, use, sale and purchase of
cannabis and other recreational drugs. It backs that up with a
maximum fine of 75,000 euros ($97,500) or up to ten years in
prison. Not only is pot unequivocally illegal in the eyes of the
law, but some French companies are requiring that job candidates
give urine samples to determine whether they use it. And there is
little visible public sentiment to go squishy on that. Even
Socialist President François Hollande, who never saw a liberal
cause he didn’t espouse, made no campaign promises last year about
legalizing cannabis. Try explaining to a Frenchman that the U.S.
has a more conservative approach to drugs.
American and French judicial institutions also differ on how
they have accepted, or not, the radical, emblematic liberal
campaign pledges of Obama and Hollande. The former promised
sweeping health care reform and produced the Affordable Care Act of
dubious constitutionality. Did Congress have the right to force
citizens to purchase a product — the individual mandate — or pay a
penalty? The administration claimed it was allowable under the
Commerce Clause. The Supremes had to admit that this was wrong, so
under the leadership of a complaisant Chief Justice John Roberts,
they found a way to make Obamacare legal. The requirement to buy
health insurance was simply a new tax! Or maybe both a penalty and
a tax. Whatever, the highest court in the land went along with an
important expansion of the welfare state.
Compare that with the judicial fate of one of François
Hollande’s highest-profile pledges. He vowed to soak the rich for
all they were worth, notably with a battery of new tax legislation
including the infamous, confiscatory 75 percent tax on income over
$1.3 million. But when the new fiscal law — a symbol of French
Socialism if ever there was one — was passed last December, French
conservatives immediately challenged it before France’s Conseil
Constitutionnel, charged with ensuring that new laws conform to the
constitution. Alas and alack for Hollande, it quickly struck down
the 75 percent tax, along with tougher rules on how wealth, stock
options and capital gains were to be taxed. In an embarrassing
political setback for Hollande, it declared the tax package
violated tax burden equality before the law. While the Supreme
Court approved a big, controversial new tax, France’s watchdog drew
a line in the sand explicitly limiting how far socialist taxation
could go. Who’s more liberal?
In both countries the concerted homosexual effort to undermine
the family as the basis of society is gaining ground. But it is in
the U.S. that same-sex marriage is advancing faster, as timid
conservative opposition yields to the specious “equality” arguments
of activists, the issue’s appeal to politicos as a vote-getter, and
the homosexual lobby’s $35 million propaganda campaign. The 1996
Defense of Marriage Act (soon to be left to the tender mercies of
the Roberts Supreme Court) did nothing to discourage voters in
Maine, Maryland, and Washington state from becoming the first to
approve same-sex marriage by popular vote in November, joining the
six other states and the District of Columbia where lawmakers or
court rulings already allowed it — some 14 percent of the U.S.
population. That leaves only 30 states with constitutional
amendments defining marriage as between a man and a woman;
legislators in several of those will consider changing that this
year.
The White House, of course, is all for it. So are boosters like
the Illinois businessmen who came out in favor of homosexual
marriage on the eminently moral grounds that it would be good for
hotels and the wedding industry — even Sinclair Lewis in
Babbitt wouldn’t have dared make that up. To the
appreciative applause of gay rights groups, Newt Gingrich wetted
his finger, checked the wind, and advised Republicans to get used
to the inevitable. After all, if a majority seems to approve, it
must be right! Don’t look for principled leadership from the
precincts of Washington National Cathedral, either. Dean Gary Hall
gaily announces he will join lesbian, bisexual, homosexual and
transgenders in a gaudy travesty of holy matrimony beneath its
neogothic spires. Those inside the Beltway might understand that
the Cathedral, site of the consecration of an openly homosexual
bishop, has long been a liberal maverick within the international
Anglican communion. But in the Age of the Image, the world’s retina
will record that one of America’s premier religious landmarks
stands as a mockery of family values.
The battle to save the traditional family is probably lost in
France, too, but French conservatives are at least determined to go
down fighting. And the vigorous war they are waging against
same-sex marriage and adoption is not over whether it is an
inevitable, vote-getting trend, or a good money-maker for business,
but over religion and values.
The political deck is stacked against them. François Hollande
promised he would deliver his “marriage for all” law — overturning
Napoleon’s code civil of 1804 defining marriage as a union
between a man and a woman — during his first year as president. He
has the Socialist Party votes in parliament to ram it through. It
will be, he hopes, one of his key “progressive” social reforms, as
well as a welcome diversion from the economic crisis that has sent
his numbers plunging to a record low of 35 percent for a new
president. Conservative opponents of the law want him to honor
Candidate Hollande’s pledge to put important social issues to a
referendum. His administration replies that the issue was
implicitly settled when he won the election last May, end of
discussion. Presidential Concubine and First Mistress Valéry
Trierweiler proudly declared she would be a witness at France’s
first homo-marriage as soon as the law was passed.
Traditionalist opposition has been much more intense than either
Hollande or his girlfriend anticipated, starting with the retort by
a conservative member of parliament that Mademoiselle Trierweiler
had no official status and would do much better to shut up. Tens of
thousands of protesters began taking to the streets of France’s
major cities in November, waving banners saying “don’t touch civil
marriage,” “all born of a union of a man and a woman,” and “Made in
Maman et Papa.” They ridicule a law that would officially
ban the words mère and père on birth
certificates, changing official references to “parent un”
and “parent deux.” Vociferous street demonstrations
climaxed January 13 with a monster, miles-long Paris march of some
half a million, tens of thousands having been bused in from the
provinces. They may not win the good fight, but they are,
literally, walking the walk.
Catholic bishops have taken up the cause, Paris Cardinal André
Vingt-Trois thundering that same-sex marriage was “a sham that will
smash one of the foundations of society.” The outspoken Lyon
Cardinal Philippe Barbarin went further, warning that homosexual
marriage would “herald a complete breakdown in society,” leading to
polygamy, pedophilia, and incest. The Catholic Church has been
joined in protest by French Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist
spiritual leaders. More import on the ground, thousands of
conservative local mayors, representing a rural France rooted in
the family values of traditional Christian society, have warned
that they will refuse to officiate over same-sex marriages. That
ball is still in Hollande’s court.
It helps to let off steam on talk radio and negotiate endlessly
over entitlement spending. But, seen from this side of the
Atlantic, American conservatives seem to shy from muscular, grass
roots opposition to creeping, half-baked liberalism. As the U.S.
begins another four years of Obama-style social democracy, they
could do worse than taking a leaf from their French counterparts’
book.
