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| The legislation, a key election pledge of Socialist President Francois Hollande, was passed by 329 votes to 229 in the National Assembly. EPA photo |
Gay rights
activists were celebrating Wednesday after France's National Assembly endorsed
a hugely controversial bill to legalise same-sex marriage and adoption.
The bill,
comfortably adopted by the primary chamber on Tuesday evening, still has to go
to the Senate for examination and approval, but the upper house is unlikely to
prevent the groundbreaking reform from becoming law by the summer.
"I was
in the Assembly and it was really a very moving moment," Nicolas Gougain,
a spokesman for the Inter-LGBT rights group, told AFP.
"We so
badly want to see this bill adopted after many, many years of campaigning for
equal rights.
"It
was very satisfying too that there was such a clear majority and that the
debate allowed deputies to address the falsehoods that have been spread for
months about families with gay parents." Gougain said his organisation
would be following the debate in the Senate closely but voiced confidence the
gay community would be able to celebrate a landmark victory with a
once-in-a-generation party at the annual Gay Pride march, scheduled to take
place in Paris on June 29.
"We
will also be making sure that politicians stick to their commitment to look at
the issue of medically assisted conception and the rights of transsexuals, once
this bill is on the statute book," Gougain added.
The
legislation, a key election pledge of Socialist President Francois Hollande,
was passed by 329 votes to 229 in the National Assembly.
The vote
came 10 days after lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to adopt its key article
which redefines marriage as a contract between two people rather than between a
man and a woman.
With opinion
polls having consistently shown that a comfortable majority of the French
support gay marriage, Hollande could never have anticipated that a promise he
made in his election manifesto last year would generate so much controversy.
A campaign
orchestrated by the Catholic Church and belatedly backed by the mainstream
centre-right opposition steadily gathered momentum throughout the autumn and
culminated in a giant protest in Paris last month.
Somewhere
between 340,000 and 800,000 demonstrators flooded into the capital in a protest
that was at least twice the size of a pro-gay marriage march staged later in
the month.
In
September, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, the archbishop of Lyon, claimed the
government's plans to redefine the concept of marriage would open the door to
incest and polygamy.
That
prompted Bertrand Delanoe, the mayor of Paris and one of France's few openly
gay politicians, to say the elderly cleric must have "flipped his
lid".
Similar
withering criticism was directed at Serge Dassault, a prominent industrialist
who suggested the French would die out after being consumed by the same
decadence that led to the fall of ancient Greece.
"We'll
have a land of homos," Dassault claimed. "And then in 10 years there
will be no-one left. It's stupid." Throughout all the turmoil, Hollande's
support for the legislation has not wavered and his partner, Valerie
Trierweiler, has revealed that the president will be attending the marriages of
gay friends once the legislation is on the statute books.
The Senate
will debate the proposed law from April 2.
Gay men and
women can already adopt as individuals in France if approved by social
services.
A separate
law on providing medically assisted conception to gay couples, already extended
to heterosexual couples unable to conceive, will be debated later in the year.
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