One of the world’s most famous and prestigious fashion houses has come under barrage of harsh and angry attacks after stating to the Italian press that, “The only family is the traditional one.”
Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana of the Italian fashion house Dolce and Gabbana are themselves gay men. All the more surprising, then, that other high profile homosexuals should create a social media tsunami against the pair. Elton John, the English singer and songwriter, has called for a boycott of Dolce and Gabbana on Twitter with the hashtag#boycottdolcegabbana.
“How dare you refer to my beautiful children as ‘synthetic’,” snapped Elton John, “And shame on you for wagging your judgemental little fingers at IVF…”
This brouhaha began with an interview that Dolce and Gabbana gave to the Italian magazine, Panorama. In the interview the pair offered a very clear defense of the traditional family: “We oppose gay adoptions. The only family is the traditional one. No chemical off springs and rented uteruses, semen from a catalog… life has a natural flow, there are things that should not be changed.”
Within hours Instagram and Twitter exploded with salvos aimed at the “medieval” and”oppressive” comments of Dolce and Gabbana. Numerous enraged critics blame the “Stone Age” views of the fashion pair on their Catholic Italian upbringing, perhaps because Stefano Gabbana noted that “The family is not a fad. In it there is a supernatural sense of belonging.”
A blog post by Melanie McDonagh at The Spectator notes “there’s been a giant, collective hissy intake of breathe in the reaction” to the interview, and then suggests that recent fashion layouts featuring children in First Communion apparel underscores the Catholic sensibility of the two men:
They have a remarkably consistent – for fashion – way of looking at the world. It’s about family, the kind of families they had, of the Italian/Sicilian Catholic variety. So, their beautiful – and I mean really beautiful, not just freaky, unlike some – models are placed in the context of grannies, grandads, picturesque peasants and children – occasionally in first communion outfits. Their last show, which the fashion press loved, brought the house down at the end, when the models came on the catwalk holding or leading their adorable children. It was, I suppose, babies as accessories, but another way of looking at it was a celebration of motherhood.
What is most interesting about the split within the high-profile international gay community over the interview, followed by Elton John’s call for a boycott, is that it is a very public display of the intolerance the gay movement shows toward anyone—however much otherwise admired—who refuses to comply with their agenda. On some French Instagram pages there are “Je Suis Charlie” warnings that such vitriol towards those who do not share one’s viewpoint on gay marriage and adoption are another whole issue that the gay community must face. In one exchange it was pointed out that “you worked for decades to bring about tolerance, and now you are yourselves most intolerant.”
A second issue this dust-up demonstrates is the rage that flares when proponents of same-sex “marriages” are confronted with a biological truth. For them, the D and G interview was an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment, a stark account of the truth they have tried to gloss over: Babies come from and need both a mother and a father. Domenico Dolce stated it plainly, “You are born to a mother and a father—at least, that is how it should be.” The designers’ website features a page with numerous photos of families, with the quote:
“THE FAMILY IS OUR POINT OF REFERENCE.”— Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana.
A last thought is that those who defend natural marriage and family must remember that the “gay community” is not monolithic. A good chunk of the gay (here the term means those homosexuals who live openly as homosexual persons) population do not in fact want to emulate natural families. Either they refuse such heterosexual expectations of family formation, or like Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, apparently, they recognize the biological truth and feel no need to pretend otherwise. This is perhaps an opening, a common ground on which discussion with gay persons might begin–that certain truths are immutable.
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