France adopted quite early a civil union scheme (granting significantly less rights than marriage) and homosexuality had been a non issue in the public debate for a very long time. But since the current government made clear that gay marriage would be allowed, there has been a lot of turmoil. All socially conservative elements we hardly ever heard about came out of the woods to fight the planned destruction of family values. There have been mass protests and so on. So, homosexuality became again a contentious issue. Even though the law was passed 8-9 months ago, the agitation about it still hasn’t subsided.
I would remind you that surveying in a country as large as Canada, is much easier when focused on the urban population. To represent the large but enormously spread out and diverse rural communities is a huge and expensive task. Compared to France, a much smaller and more compact country, by far.
Whenever you read research saying, “Canada is this or that…”, you’d do well to realize it more likely reflects overwhelmingly urban opinions than the true diversity of opinion nationwide.
More specifically, whether anti-gay groups already existed but didn’t do these sort of highly visible protests, or were newly-formed, or there’d been a certain level of anti-gay protest already.
There were groups with a dim view of homosexuality, obviously (conservative catholics, far right, etc…) and people targeting homosexuals on an individual basis, but there were no group I’m aware of specifically dedicated to fight the rampant progress of homosexuality, nor any anti-gay protest I can remember. Homosexuality just wasn’t really an issue.
As I said, people came out of the woods, and realizing there were a lot of them, staged numerous protests. Some previously unheard of leaders appeared, the far right embarked on the crusade and part of the conservative politicians pandered to the crowd.
Recently, these same groups were in the streets again protesting this time “anti-family” teachings and books in schools and before that access of non married and heterosexual couples to medically assisted reproduction. There still were anti gay marriage banners displayed in the protests. Gay marriage clearly boosted the “family value” crowd that was previously hardly ever heard of, let alone listened to, in France.
