French religious right: Kid wouldn’t be dead from hate crime if you hadn’t legalized gay marriage

6/6/2013 4:16pm by John Aravosis

 

The leader of the French religious right, Frigide Barjot, said today that 18 year old pro-gay college student Clément Méric would not have been killed in a vicious attack by right wing skinheads had France not recently legalized gay marriage.
Comedienne Frigide Barjot (who works under a pseudonym that’s apparently a sexual pun on the name of the French actress, Brigitte Bardot), is the leader of France’s anti-gay right, that includes the Catholic church and the lead conservative party in France, the UMP (for lack of a better comparison, France’s Republican party).
Unlike America, France is not a very religious country.  But like America, France’s right-wing parties have latched on to legislative gay-bashing as a means of unifying the right at the ballot box.  Sadly, in response to the right’s hysteria-building over gay marriage, anti-gay violence – and overall terror threats against the government – have increased of late.

Anti-gay demonstrators in Paris give the fascist salute while confronting police during an anti-gay-marriage protest.

Things have gotten so bad in the French right that Barjot herself refused to attend the latest official anti-gay protest, for fear of the extremists that are attempting to take over her movement.

Clément Méric, an 18 year old French college student murdered in Paris by far-right skinheads. (Credit: Action Antifasciste)

Today we learned that 18 year old Clément Méric, a pro-gay college student attending the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris, succumbed to injuries recently sustained at the hands of three skinheads at a Paris train station.  (Violent crimes are relatively uncommon in France, as compared to the US, though that’s been changing of late.)
Sadly, France’s anti-gay right, including the Catholic Church, have given an odd “denunciation/justification” for the increase in violence.  Violence is always wrong, they say, but who wouldn’t turn violent when the government jams gay marriage down the people’s throats? (Mind you, a majority of the French people support gay marriage in the polls.)
First it was France’s top Catholic official giving a creepy statement that seemed to justify the violence, and threaten more, while claiming to condemn it.
Then it was a statement from Barjot herself, which to some ears seemed to sound like a threat for more violence.

“[Président] Hollande veut du sang, IL en aura ! Tout Le monde EST furieux. Nous vivons dans une dictature.”
“[French President] Hollande wants blood, and he’s going to get it.  Everyone is furious. We live in a dictatorship.”

And now, in response to the attack on young Clément Méric, Barjot has penned a piece that again denounces the violence, but then turns around and, incredibly, blames gay marriage supporters for the right-wing’s murder of this young man. Here’s Barjot:

This extreme fight is the result of a power that for nine months has refused to listen to the French people.  The President has caused extremism to grow by passing a law that the French didn’t want, and in a manner that was authoritarian and undemocratic.  When we refuse to act like a democracy, extremism grows.  In a way, you could say that there was a death because of this denial of democracy.

Nice lady, he?  Keep in mind that the French anti-gay right is closely tied to America’s anti-gay leaders, especially NOM, the Nation Organization for Marriage. While once crowing about their success in France, they’ve been interestingly silent now that the bodies are dropping.

Vigil held for Clément Méric today in Paris.

Barjot continues, explaining that she of course condemns the violence, but that the only way to fight the extremists is to repeal gay marriage and replace it with a civil unions law.
Right.  The only way to stop the anti-gay right from murdering gay people is to repeal gay marriage.  Actually, there is another way to stop the anti-gay right from murdering people – just stop murdering people.
Like so many of the passive-aggressive haters we face here in America, Barjot does a tremendous job of “repudiating the violence,” while at the same time seemingly making excuses for it, and worse, blaming the victim.
Is this the way France, and the rest of Europe, fought against home-grown terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, by seeking out ways to placate the terrorists?
And did African-Americans in the 1950s and 1960s bring the police hoses and German shepherds on themselves since, after all, they “jammed” their civil rights down the throats of an American public that simply wanted to be left alone by people they considered inferior and immoral?
And what’s next?  Shall we blame the French Resistance for, you know, resisting the Nazis?  After all, if the Resistance hadn’t created that climate during the Occupation, the Nazis would have never felt the need to kill so many French people in return.
However it’s spelled, hate really is universal.