Billet
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Barely appointed to Matignon, Emmanuel Macron’s new Prime Minister was criticized for positions from more than forty years ago by the rebels.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon did not wait long to relay a stink bomb against Michel Barnier. Speaking on Thursday, the leader of La France Insoumise denounced the appointment of “someone who voted against the decriminalization of homosexuality” and wondered about “the meaning of such a message”, implying that it was a question of pleasing the homophobic extreme right. Immediately, the gun-toting LFI people took pleasure in relaying «l’information» : Just think, Emmanuel Macron sent a homophobe to Matignon.
The process is well known to populists: they take the false, the amalgam, the innuendo, the shortcut and wrap it all in a grain of truth. Let’s go back to try to see clearly, because Mélenchon is referring to a time that only those over 60 have known. Just after the return of the left to power, in May 1981, the National Assembly voted, on July 27, 1982, the bill tabled by the socialist deputy Raymond Forni – and of which Gisèle Halimi was the rapporteur – repealing article 331 paragraph 2 of the penal code which set the age of sexual consent for homosexuals at 18 years while it was 15 years for heterosexuals. It was therefore not at all a question of “decriminalizing” homosexuality
