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LES ECHOS

After Sarkozy's Defeat, Will France Be Next To Legalize Gay Marriage?

During the just concluded campaign, France’s incoming Socialist President François Hollande had vowed to push through gay marriage during his first year in office. Conservative Catholic groups are already gearing up for a fight.

2011 Gay Pride in Toulouse, France (Guillaume Paumier)
2011 Gay Pride in Toulouse, France (Guillaume Paumier)

PARIS – Following Barack Obama's surprise public support for gay marriage, incoming French President François Hollande may be poised to push through legislation to give same-sex couples in France the right for the first time to marry.

During his presidential campaign, Socialist candidate Hollande declared his support both for same-sex marriage and adoption right for LGBT couples. He vowed to pursue the issue in early 2013 if he won.

After he is sworn into office Tuesday, Hollande will be watched closely both by gay rights activists as well as a core of traditionalist Catholic groups virulently opposed to same-sex marriage.

On Sunday, some 1,500 traditionalist Catholics close to the far-right leaning Institut Civitas religious group, gathered in central Paris, declaring same-sex marriage "deeply anti-Christian, anti-family and anti-national." Marginal as these groups may be, they still echo a point of view shared by many believers.

Young Catholic priests from Versailles, west of Paris, declared on the influential website Padreblog : "We hope that, now that he's become the president of all the French, François Hollande will be able to see the bigger picture, and realize that his campaign promises should remain campaign promises."

Since 2001, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden have allowed same-sex couples to marry. Same-sex marriage has been a longstanding point of conflict in France, though the moment may be ripe. In June 2011, a poll found that 63% of the population favored same-sex marriage rights.

Offering additional momentum was the news last week of the surprise public support for gay marriage rights by U.S. President Barack Obama, though in the United States such decisions are decided on the state level.

Read more from Le Monde in French. Full article by Stéphanie Le Bars

Photo – Guillaume Paumier

*This is a digest item, not a direct translation

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Ideas

Purebreds To "Rasse" Theory: A German Critique Of Dog Breeding

Just like ideas about racial theory, the notion of seeking purebred dogs is a relatively recent human invention. This animal eugenics project came from a fantasy of recreating a glorious past and has done irreparable harm to canines. A German

Photo of a four dogs, including two dalmatians, on leashes

No one flinches when we refer to dogs, horses or cows as purebreds, and if a friend’s new dog is a rescue, we see no problem in calling it a mongrel or crossbreed.

Wieland Freund

BERLIN — Some words always seem to find a way to sneak through. We have created a whole raft of embargoes and decrees about the term race: We prefer to say ethnicity, although that isn’t always much better. In Germany, we sometimes use the English word race rather than our mother tongue’s Rasse.

But Rasse crops up in places where English native speakers might not expect to find it. If, on a walk through the woods, the park or around town, a German meets a dog that doesn’t clearly fit into a neat category of Labrador, dachshund or Dalmatian, they forget all their misgivings about the term and may well ask the person holding the lead what race of dog it is.

Although we have turned our back on the shameful racial theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of an “encyclopedia of purebred dogs” or a dog handler who promises an overview of almost “all breeds” (in German, “all races”) has somehow remained inoffensive.

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