Wielding powerful symbols and positive slogans, a large group of demonstrators that included many baby strollers and hand-holding older couples took to the same Guadalajara streets last Saturday afternoon as a gay pride march had followed just a few weeks earlier, but with a markedly different message.
While the gay pride group had sported their signature multicolored flags and marched to a pounding disco beat, Saturday’s “March for the children” (Marcha por los niños) was accompanied by popular religious songs and chose the “clean” color white, plus those denoting a baby’s gender: baby-blue and pink.
“Yes to the right of children to have a papa and a mama!” “Yes to matrimony between a man and a woman!” proclaimed hundreds of identical printed signs bearing the slogan “Jalisco is united for children” and carried by white-clad, middle-class adults, teens and children toting baby-blue and pink balloons and pennants.
A few signs were unique — “Peace and respect in all Mexico; Viva la familia,” said one, accompanied by an image of the Holy Family — but generally were not negative. Even a critic of the march writing in the leftist journal Horizonte didn’t see a single anti-homosexual slogan, although he wrote that “homophobia was present although not openly spoken,” that marchers evidenced “tolerance but not respect” and that he found this “much more unsettling” than if they had been “shaven-headed Nazis proudly saluting the swastika.”
Organizers predicted 100,000 marchers and said 60,000 turned out, while some detractors estimated the crowd at only 30,000.
The weather cooperated and the crowd’s tone was low-key and congenial. Although at the height of the march, participants’ chants could be heard several blocks away, there was little evidence of the confrontation that characterizes some similar demonstrations outside Mexico.
“We’re from Guadalajara. We heard about the march in our parish church and on the radio,” said a broadly smiling, mature couple, the man wearing a traditional, white guayabera shirt and the woman a white manta dress. “Thank you for joining us!” she said to a reporter accidentally but fortuitously dressed in a white shirt.
The backdrop of the march was a recent decision by the Supreme Court of Mexico that declared state laws limiting matrimony to a man and a woman are unconstitutional (as well as similar moves in the United States advancing the cause of same-sex marriages).
The Catholic organizers’ decision to focus on children was an astute move in a country as decidedly child-oriented as Mexico.
“The speakers were very positive,” said a father accompanied by his two young children on Avenida Chapultepec, where the march ended around 6 p.m. and participants lingered in the late afternoon sun eating ice cream. “They mentioned a new law that would tell teenagers in public schools to decide their sexual orientation. We don’t agree with it,” he added.
Similarly, commentators noted that the marchers’ principal objection was to any future change in the Jalisco Civil Code, which will mandate that schoolchildren and teens receive instructions that same-sex marriages are legal, that babies are born asexual and that they can choose their sexual orientation when they are older. Other marchers simply said that they do not agree with the behavior of some homosexuals.
Leaders and demonstrators took pains to point out that they don’t consider themselves anti-homosexual, but object to the Supreme Court of Mexico decision taken by “four magistrates for 120 million [people] and behind closed doors,” as one speaker at the march put it.
On the heels of the march, a group called Mexicanos Por la Vida de Todos (Mexicans for the lives of everyone) said there had been similar marches in 29 other spots around the country and announced a petition drive to try to force the repeal of the Supreme Court’s pro-same-sex-marriage decision, saying that the court acted in an “ideological manner.”
Still, critics of the marchers say that, in view of the court decision and the feelings of the younger generation, conservatives are fighting “a battle already lost,” calling them “simple souls who are clinging to a vanishing world.”