Queer Ally, Defender of Justice, Resigns in France

Christiane Taubira ready to zoom off, but not into the sunset.

By Kelly Cogswell

I love Christiane Taubira. If she appeared before me like Yemaya, or the Virgin Mary, I'd fall at her feet. The French Republic has rarely had such a staunch and principled defender. As an elected deputy of the French parliament, she was the driving force behind a 2001 law recognizing slavery and the Atlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. François Hollande's French Minister of Justice since 2012, she spent months introducing and defending the 2013 law that would give lesbians and gay men marriage equality, and establish her as one of the most hated targets of the extreme right.

She didn't care. Every day during the battle I'd wake up and check out YouTube to catch her latest impassioned speech, or snippy response, or even extended fit of giggles. She took the fight personally as a black woman. And said so. Equality was equality to her. And she'd been fighting for it her entire life. In France as a young black student newly arrived from her birthplace of Cayenne in French Guiana. In Guiana fighting for the cause of independence.

Now, faced with having to defend proposed legislation which actually attacks equality, she's walked away from her post, denouncing the antiterrorism measure that would strip convicted terrorists of French citizenship if they are dual nationals, even if they are born in France.

While it may seem like a small, symbolic gesture, that would almost never be applied, it is part of a Constitutional reform that will institutionalize inequality, officially creating two classes of French citizens. There are those who have citizenship permanently and irrevocably--mostly white French people born in France into white French families. And those whose citizenship is theoretically vulnerable--mostly immigrants and the children of immigrants who also have citizenship in another country.

This act can only exacerbate existing racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration sentiment at a moment when all of Europe is grappling with a huge swell of refugees. And citizens of color in France, including North African Jews, are already considered not quite French.

Most importantly, here, where Equality and Fraternity are two of the three pillars of the French Nation, along with Liberty, it also undermines what it means to be French. Like the U.S., France has never quite lived up to its ideals. But the average French person still believes in them, at least in the abstract. And when social and legal change does happen, some aspect of liberty or equality or fraternity will be the underlying argument. I can't imagine France without them. Will it be converted into a U.S. post-9/11, cynical or indifferent to vanishing civil liberties, secret prisons, a parallel justice system with its own Guantanamos, endless surveillance?

I saw the Spielberg movie Bridge of Spies during the holidays, and especially liked that scene between a Cold War spook and Tom Hanks who plays Brooklyn lawyer James Donovan defending an accused Russian spy. The CIA guy wants him to share confidential information, and tactics. And Donovan goes all Constitutional on him defending the right to a fair trial for everyone, and asking just what it is Americans have in common, anyway? Especially Americans like them, Donovan, the child of Irish parents? The spy guy with a German name?

Donovan answers his own rhetorical question by saying that nothing at all unites Americans. Just a few abstract ideas, a few principles. Like Equality. Especially equality under the law, a competent defense. For everyone.

It was eerie to watch the movie here in Paris just a few weeks after the November 13 attacks when people were still lighting candles and laying mountains of flowers in front of the cafes and restaurants and clubs where hundreds of men and women were slaughtered and maimed by ISIS terrorists. People were still afraid. The streets were half empty. Tourists had cancelled their reservations and many Parisians were avoiding cafes, especially the terraces. You could get a seat anywhere.

Also, Hollande had just made his big speech to the parliament with his ministers there in the front row. I saw Taubira listening as he tried to counter fear and grief with strength and anger, condemning the attacks. And of course, laying out his anti-terrorism measures, which included declaring a state of emergency, possible Constitutional reforms, and this provision to strip nationality.

When he said that, I thought I saw Taubira's face close in on itself. And afterwards, when she joined the whole room singing the Marseilleise, I wondered what that call to battle meant to her.

Now I know. A portion of her parting tweet was, "Parfois résister c'est rester, parfois résister c'est partir..." "Sometimes resisting means staying, sometimes resisting means walking away…" She'd stayed for months trying to fight the provision. But having failed, she couldn’t stay, and offer her seeming approval. Already, she's published a book-length essay against the legislation. She may have left the government, but she's still fighting for France.

Go Ireland? The Real Meaning of the Marriage Victory

By Kelly Cogswell

Apparently, rainbows broke out all over Ireland as people voted "yes" to letting queers tie the knot. It was hailed as remarkable victory for LGBT people, not just because it was the first successful attempt to hold a popular vote on same-sex marriage, but because the measure won widespread support across the nation from the big liberal city of Dublin to the tiniest villages boasting little more than a church and a pub.

As in the U.S., I'm not sure how important a marriage win is for our community at large. Because it's possible that support for same-sex marriage is less a departure from Ireland's entrenched conservative, Catholic values than a reflection of them. A successful trip to city hall largely boils down to giving the happy couple the right to declare monogamy, protect inheritance, and pay less tax. What could be more traditional than that?

In fact, that's how the global marriage equality movement has characterized itself, largely making its case by mothballing the freak flag, banishing liberation in favor of equality, and carefully removing the sex from homosexual. Most of the photos illustrating the marriage issue portray us as hand-holding milquetoasts, content with chaste kisses and changing the nappies of somebody else's kids. Our unions are spiritual. Our new rights as abstract as citizenship.

So far, this right to bear boutonnieres hasn't made much difference to queer lives in the flesh, in the street. We're still getting bashed outside our own bars, and bullied in the locker rooms. Queer kids are getting kicked out of their own homes. Pervasive social change is still a distant promise.

Nevertheless, some members of Ireland's Labour Party are interpreting the victory there as a sign it's time to improve the country's strict anti-abortion laws. First on the agenda is repealing the 1983 constitutional amendment giving the "unborn" an explicit right to life. Second is broadening the 2013 law that allows abortion only when a woman's on the verge of death or suicide.

Currently, unless they have the means to get abortions abroad, Irish women are forced to bear unwanted children, even in cases of rape, or when the fetus won't survive past birth. If you have an illegal abortion, you face up to fourteen years in jail. Even women that qualify for an abortion under the 2013 law can't always get them. Every year it seems there are cases of suicidal girls forced to carry a kid to term. Last year, a brain-dead woman was actually kept alive as a human incubator in an attempt to save a fetus.

Women just don't count for much, there, or anywhere. We lack dignity both in life and death. Which is the biggest problem when you try to look to marriage equality as a predictor of the abortion fight. Men (and women) are winning rights in the first case. The second is all about females. And what are we but our bodies and our flesh? Especially when it comes to abortion and there's no denying that at some point a penis came into contact with a vagina, or at least a sperm met up with an egg, and the result is growing there in a female belly.

If somebody insists on finding a queer comparison, a canary to sing about the end of Patriarchy, a better predictor would be the fate of trans and gender queer people. What happens to our girly boys and masculine girls when they dare step outside or into that rigid box of gender? The way we challenge expectations of bodies and control intersects more closely to issues of abortion and reproductive freedom than the question of marriage equality ever could.

And the state of the trans Irish nation doesn't give us much encouragement for an abortion fight. At the moment, trans people can legally change their names, but still not their genders. The Gender Recognition Bill currently in the works contains regressive medical certification requirements and age restrictions.

In a report published last year by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland showed that trans and genderqueer people paid a high price for moving beyond traditional roles. The verbal harassment is endless. One person said, "Every day [I'm] called a 'tranny', 'lezzer', 'lesbian', 'it's a man', 10 to 20 times a day every day in Dublin."

Trans people are attacked in bathrooms, on the street. In one of the worst cases of late, an 18-year-old was beaten, chased and raped for being a trans man. Like other trans victims, and the average woman, gay, straight, bi, trans, he didn't trust the police enough to report it. United in humiliation and fear, we have more in common than we think. Éirinn go Brách.