Left-wing documentary film-maker Paul Moreira suggests that the government is using the media-friendly debate on gay marriage to deflect attention from its economic failings.
Article source: “Mariage gay : la bataille qui dissimule la défaite de l'économie”, Paul Moreira, (ed. by Louise Pothier), Le Nouvel Observateur, 30/01/2013
Nearly ten years ago, when I was working for the TV channel Canal Plus, I fought to broadcast a documentary about the first gay marriage in France illegally celebrated by Noël Mamère, the Green Mayor of the town of Bègles. It was a film by Jean Michel Vennemani and Yves Jeuland, two respected documentary makers. A remarkable film about courage: political courage; the courage to lift your head up high when you’re queer.
Canal Plus, just as courageously, broadcast the documentary in a prime time slot. And the audience ratings plummeted. No one cared at that time. In any case, the marriage in Bègles was declared null by the courts.
I’m bringing this back up by way of introduction to show that “le mariage pour tous” has always seemed to me a natural development. After having been hunted down, burned, tortured, gassed, discriminated against, beaten up, ghettoised, and then merely victimised and mocked, homosexuals do have a right to basic common normality. And the right to get help in solving their administrative issues concerning inheritance and so on.
That being said, I worry about the extraordinary ubiquity of the gay marriage debate in the media. All of a sudden it seems that France’s fate depends solely on this issue.
It is a cruel diversion. On the one hand, you have the turmoil surrounding gay marriage and the government’s legitimate determination to see it pass into law. On the other hand, with every passing week, in fact with every passing day, the government proves its political powerlessness in the face of new reports of failing businesses and workers dogged by fear who find themselves without any prospects or control over their lives.
The preeminence of social issues in the ongoing public debates, in the prop-agenda, only highlights all the more terribly the severe limitations of the government’s ability to act on the economy and society.
The gay marriage bill will be passed. And that is good news.
But why can’t the ArcelorMittal steelworks and the PSA Peugeot Citroën plants be saved from closure? Why can’t measures be passed to put an end to major companies indulging in “tax optimisation”, moving revenues through European tax havens, thus bleeding national budgets dry? Or to block the dismantling of Europe at the hands of the rich who increasingly treat it as a nice little tax-avoidance scheme.
The rueful look on the face of Arnaud Montebourg, minister for “productive recovery”, on a recent political TV show was a sorry sight. Attacked by a quartet of economic ultra-liberals, he seemed to be fighting a losing battle in defending what is left of the French social model.
I particularly liked the neo-thatcherite turn of the British journalist from The Economist. Nobody needs to learn all the details of the inquiries on the TV programme Cash Investigation off by heart, but it has revealed that Pearson, the industrial group which owns The Economist, is allegedly a tax evasion specialist. Journalists from Cash... and the BBC have uncovered fake financial packages which have allowed Pearson to allegedly create phony subsidiaries in Luxemburg so as to pay a minimum of UK taxes.
Finally, one needs to bear in mind the key fact that such economic impotence tends to play into the hands of the Front National.
Translation: Stéphane Devos and Sophie Kowalczuk
Editing: Sam Trainor