France 24, by Louise Nordstrom: On June 19, Paris’s Mayor Anne Hidalgo honored LGBTQI+ icons by renaming four squares and streets after them in the French capital’s fourth arrondissement, which is located in the Marais – the city’s unofficial LGBTQI+ neighborhood.
The retitling now brings the total number of Parisian squares and streets named after famous LGBTI+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Intersexual, and more) figures to more than 40 since Hidalgo’s 2014 inauguration and comes amid heightening hostility towards the community in France.
According to a report published in May by the SOS Homophobie association, 2018 was a “black year” for the French LGBTQI+ community, with a staggering 15 percent rise in homophobic attacks from the year before.
In 2016, Hidalgo, who has vowed to make Paris a prominent Rainbow City during her tenure, appointed her regional councilor Jean-Luc Romero to oversee actions Paris could take to increase the visibility of the LGBTQI+ community to support its cause.
In a 135-page report presented in 2017, Romero, who is openly gay and who in 2002 became the first French politician to reveal that he had AIDS, then made 52 recommendations on how to make Paris more LGBTQI+ friendly, including by renaming some of the city’s squares and streets.
“#ParisIsProud and will always be,” Hidalgo said on Instagram following Wednesday’s inauguration.
Guillaume Mélanie, the co-president of France’s Urgence Homophobie, who attended the ceremonies, tweeted: “This was a very emotional morning. It was a historic morning for the LGBTI community. Paris officials inaugurated several squares dedicated to LGBTI figures who wrote our history.”
Our Comment:
Back to the future! France is reverting to its pre-revolution times.
Prophetic Link:
“France presented also the characteristics which especially distinguished Sodom. During the Revolution there was manifest a state of moral debasement and corruption similar to that which brought destruction upon the cities of the plain. And the historian presents together the atheism and the licentiousness of France, as given in the prophecy: “Intimately connected with these laws affecting religion, was that which reduced the union of marriage—the most sacred engagement which human beings can form, and the permanence of which leads most strongly to the consolidation of society—to the state of a mere civil contract of a transitory character, which any two persons might engage in and cast loose at pleasure. . . . If fiends had set themselves to work to discover a mode of most effectually destroying whatever is venerable, graceful, or permanent in domestic life, and of obtaining at the same time an assurance that the mischief which it was their object to create should be perpetuated from one generation to another, they could not have invented a more effectual plan than the degradation of marriage. . . . Sophie Arnoult, an actress famous for the witty things she said, described the republican marriage as ‘the sacrament of adultery.’”—Scott, vol. 1, ch. 17.” The Great Controversy, page 270.