Christian Vanneste: a clear thinker on homosexual rights

Expanding on its previous entry in response to a reader’s request, Galliawatch quotes Christian Vanneste’s remarks in the French National Assembly in December 2004 when it was debating the anti-discrimination law that it ultimately passed (can a deputy now be prosecuted for something he said against a bill during the debate on that bill?), and also quotes at length a magnificent radio interview Vanneste gave shortly afterward explaining his position. What my hero Rep. Virgil Goode is to Islamization and Muslim immigration, Christian Vanneste is to homosexual rights and the tyranny of anti-discrimination codes. But Vanneste is even more articulate than Goode. He told the (openly hostile) interviewer:

Homosexuality can only be a tolerated behavior, something marginal which cannot in any case be promoted or protected over and beyond the normal protection to which any citizen is entitled…. If homosexuals want to exist, let them help each other. Public authorities, public money or laws have nothing to do with it. It’s a private behavior of no interest to the collectivity. That said, of course, they have a right to be defended as any other citizen.

This is virtually identical to my own position. As I have written at VFR, homosexuals should be left alone in their private behavior, but society should do nothing that approves or promotes homosexuality.

It is very late in the day, but articulate, principled, mainstream opponents to the suicide of the West are finally starting to appear. They will be attacked, even legally punished and politically ostracized, as Vanneste has been, but the very fact of their firm and unyielding resistance to liberalism puts the West in a new and more hopeful situation.

- end of initial entry -

Kevin O. in England writes:

Re your second posting on Christian Vanneste, your position on persons who commit sodomy matches the legislative situation that existed in England until Tony Blair became prime minister; i.e., the Sexual Offences Act 1967 legalised buggery behind closed doors, while subsequent legislation during the Thatcher era (commonly known as “Section 28”) prohibited the use of public money to promote sodomy.

My own view is that Section 28 was repealed under the current Labour government because it was an unprincipled exception which, as you regularly maintain, cannot withstand the onslaught of Liberalism. This is because the very act of legalising buggery behind closed doors was easily interpreted as a “public” approval of sodomy. Conservatives might maintain that there is an important distinction between decriminalisation and legalisation, but the moral message was at the very least highly ambiguous, since Parliament had appeared to abandon any attempt to explain why sodomy was still immoral even though it was no longer criminal. That ambiguity was then taken to a logical conclusion, which is that, if the 1967 Act defines sodomy as acceptable, then any argument that public promotion of sodomy goes “too far” appears to be an unprincipled exception.

LA replies:

Kevin is absolutely correct. In fact, I did not lay out my full position last night. We had long discussions on this years ago at VFR in which I had concluded that the best approach would be (not that this is politically viable at this moment, at least in the more liberal parts of the country) that the anti-sodomy laws should stay on the books, as an expression of society’s disapproval of homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, yet without being generally enforced, as was the case even prior to the Sexual Revolution. This may seem unduly harsh to some people, but the fact is that there is no neutral ground on this issue. Either society disapproves of homosexual conduct, or else it approves of it, and in the latter case we inevitably end up with the total privileging of homosexuality and the denial of people’s most basic freedoms to criticize and exclude it, as we see happening this week in Britain and France.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 02, 2007 01:31 AM | Send