Feminist Family Politics
The ion debates about the on nature the PaCS of families. in France Particularly have occasioned vexing an has outpouring been the question of opinion a out the nature of families. Particularly ve ng has been the uesti n of the status of same-sex couples. For purposes of inheritance and other legal questions, same-sex partnerships may be recognized as "unions" governed by certain contractual arrangements, but the line has been drawn at calling these unions "families" because of the question of children. All manner of expert testimony has been brought to bear on the matter of "lineage" and "kinship," most of it seeking to prove that there is something either unnatural, culturally deviant, and/or psychologically damaging about children being born to or raised by two parents of the same sex. Some have written of the "right" of children to live in heterosexual families; others have objected to homosexual parenting as a distortion of the facts of nature. Sylviane Agacinski put it this way, "Je ne crois pas qu'il serait bon, pour les enfants a venir, d'instaurer une filiation asexuee ou homosexuelle qui effacerait le fait que tout etre humain est issu d'un homme et d'une femme."1