A Lyon Capitale editorial argues that the exploitation of a “trendy” issue by business and the media, appealing to a technologically savvy generation, has oversimplified the debate and led to all those interested in the finer points being ridiculed as old fogies.
Article source: “"Mariage pour tous", quand l’activisme remplace la nuance”, Didier Maïsto, Lyon Capitale, 15/02/2013
In an article entitled “The brand names, stars and media jumping on the gay marriage bandwagon,”* blogger marcbettinelli looks at the commercial players who have taken advantage of the debate about gay marriage to garner publicity. He suggests there are lessons to be learned. But what if we were to take this a little further, push it to its logical conclusion?
“The issue of gay marriage, which began as a social debate involving politicians, scientists, philosophers, and other citizens, has taken on the form of ‘trendy’ activism in the hands of audacious advertisers and publicity agents who have massively oversimplified it. Now that it has become the latest sales pitch, this point of view implies that ‘antis’, viewed as out-dated fundamentalist conservatives, can be dismissed out of hand,” the blogger writes. “Many of them didn’t even wait for the debate to take off in the media to feature homosexual couples in their promotional campaigns. The brand The Kooples, for example, as much as three years ago, cast two young men as a couple in a promotional video. We might also mention McDonald’s, Renault, Orangina, and Eram, who attracted criticism in 2011 when they produced an advertising hoarding depicting a lesbian couple with a child to promote their shoes,” he continues.
Where marcbettinelli focuses on the world of show business, which “has also understood the value of activism,” – providing numerous examples of titillating ‘gay’ kisses on camera between French celebrities (ed.) – and on the media (like the front cover of French Elle which showed two women embracing), it seems possible to take this line of enquiry a little further and turn our attention to some of our elected politicians. One example might be Minister of Women’s Rights and government spokeswoman, Najat Wallaud-Belkacem. Her propensity for providing simplistic answers to complex questions has already been pointed out in previous articles. This is neither good nor bad; it makes no sense to judge it in such a way. It is, no doubt, more of a generational difference: in the era of the internet, of mobile messaging, of Twitter and its 140 characters, everything must be simplified to the extreme, and it must be fast, very fast, because no sooner is a piece of information released than it is replaced by the next.
In this battle of ideas reduced to slogans, of images with the value of icons, of celebrities who have become genuine brand names (are politicians really any different?), of bite-size ready-to-eat women and men, everything is about acting before the best-before-date expires, imposing certainties, killing off debate, casting one’s opponents as fuddy-duddies by ridiculing the lunatic fringe. Hence, those who did not immediately applaud le mariage pour tous, or expressed the slightest reservation, have been called homophobes, religious fundamentalists, and even fascists or anti-Semites. Ultimately, many of them would probably have been in favour of gay marriage had the right to children been sensibly treated as a separate issue and had it been the subject of calm and reasoned discussions, calling on the views of the best qualified specialists in bioethics.
But that is not how things have played out. It has now become difficult—if not impossible—for figures like Sylviane Agacinsky to be heard, despite being a well respected philosopher and left-wing intellectual. Because, where such complex issues are concerned, especially adoption and ART, it is essential to take the time to put them in perspective, to think them through, to examine the finer points, and this cannot be done in just a few seconds or in 140 characters. As my first editor used to say, at the very beginning of the nineties, when the Internet still did not exist**: “Take Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and turn it into news in brief for me.” Alright, boss… Help! I need somebody!
* “Ces marques, stars, et médias qui surfent sur la vague du « mariage pour tous »” Marc Bettinelli, (blog hosted by) Le Monde, 13/02/2013. The odd editorial decision to use the compressed (and italicised) “marcbettinelli”, the blogger's nickname in the , for the author's name (rather the conventional and polite Marc Bettinelli) may have been taken as an ironic play on the journalist's supposed fogeyishness. The decision to keep it like this in the translation therefore seems justified, even if it does come across as genuinely out of touch. (ed.)
** The Internet existed long before the early nineties, of course. What the journalist means is the World Wide Web (which took off from about 1991 onwards). This difference is rarely made in mainstream French journalism, however. Internet is routinely used to conflate the two concepts, le web presumably being deprecated as an anglicism too far. The translation “Internet” has been preferred here, as the implied error captures something of the journalist's semi-ironic fuddy-duddy point of view. (ed.)
Translation: Andréa Rome and Sophie Pacier
Editing: Sam Trainor