The pressure is tightening on Caroline Cayeux. In the evening of Saturday July 16, the Sunday Journal published an op-ed by around a hundred personalities, including elected officials from the ranks of the majority, denouncing the continued government of the minister newly appointed during the last cabinet reshuffle. In 2013, during the debates on the legalization of marriage for all, the former senator LR had evoked “an unnatural design”. Remarks that the interested party, questioned this week on this subject, maintained. “How to accept the remarks made by the Minister in charge of Territorial Communities on the eve of the national holiday? “, can we read in the forum.
Among the signatories are, in the political department, the former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, the deputies of the majority Joël Giraud, David Valence, Raphaël Gérard, Quentin Bataillon, or the mayors of Paris Center Ariel Weil (PS), of the 5th arrondissement Florence Berthout (DVD), from the 6th arrondissement Jean-Pierre Lecoq (LR) and from the 9th arrondissement Delphine Bürkli (Horizons), as well as the first deputy mayor of Marseille Michèle Rubirola (EELV).
On February 12, Caroline Cayeux confirmed her comments on marriage and adoption for same-sex couples, permitted by the Taubira law. “I obviously stand by my words. I must tell you all the same that I have a lot of friends among these people, ”she said on the set of Public Senate. Faced with the outcry, the mayor of Beauvais had backpedaled in Le Parisien, recalling that the remarks, which she now considers “stupid and clumsy”, go back ten years. “And while I can’t deny holding them, of course I won’t be using them again and regret them,” she added, offering her “deepest apologies.”
“The homophobic remarks” of the minister “personally hurt” many of the signatories of the forum published in the JDD. “The question is not whether this new minister has, in her entourage, friends among “those people”, like a mask on her prejudices”, write the signatories of the platform. “She deliberately chose to maintain homophobic language: it is certainly reprehensible. And only a judge should decide that,” they add.
“On the other hand, the question is whether the government, in its duty of solidarity, validates the position of one of its members, and whether the majority subscribes to its attitude”, underline the participants. “His words hurt many of us personally, but above all they undermine our daily efforts to uphold republican principles in our territories”, they underline, believing that Caroline Cayeux’s “regrets” do not have the ” strength of sincerity”.
Also initialed the text, entitled “To all these people”, the neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, the secretary general of the UNSA Laurent Escure, the entrepreneur Mathieu Gallet, the animator Alex Goude, the doctor of sciences Aurélie Jean or again the psychiatrist Serge Hefez. After the apologies of her minister, Elisabeth Borne assured Friday that “things are now clear”. “And Caroline Cayeux, like the rest of the government, is at work and focused on its mission,” said the Prime Minister.