My recent piece, No native voices, kicked off with a hat-tip to John Ray for a link to a Charles Bremner article in The Times. Now Mark Richardson has posted a link to the same article.
Bremner drew attention to the remarkable law passing through the French lower house, prohibiting “defaming a person or a group of persons on account of their sex or their sexual orientation.” The punishment is a prison sentence of up to six months or a £15,000 fine.
Mark observes:-
Two things stand out about this law. First, it was passed by a “centre-right” government rather than a left-wing one. In fact, some members of the “centre-right” party rebelled in order to make the law even stricter. Which goes to show that conservatives need to be critical not only of the mainstream left-liberal parties, but also of the mainstream right-liberal ones.
Second, the French Human Rights Commission opposed the law as being too much against free speech. If even a human rights commission can’t stomach the legislation, then it really must be radical in its intent. The French Human Rights Commission warned that not only might individual words, as well as books and films, be deemed outside the law, but so too might the Bible.
The obvious question to all folks interested in politics is: how can it be that the French right so apes the left and the French left apes the right? Charles Bremner has a cynical explanation:-
Homosexual and feminist groups welcomed the law, which the Government drafted in an attempt to regain credit with gay and women’s groups after it opposed homosexual marriage last spring. One of the first steps planned by SOS homophobie, a campaign group, is the prosecution of football supporters who chant pédés (queers) at players who do not meet with their favour.
According to Les Chiennes de Garde (Guard Bitches), a feminist group, the law would act as a brake on the physical abuse of women “by first outlawing verbal violence”.
The majority can always be kicked in the teeth to pander to minority needs. Why? Because it goes on voting for the people who do it just the same. For some (literally) unaccountable reason they call it democracy.
Posted by Geoff M. Beck on Sat, 18 Dec 2004 22:35 | #
We should heed the words of our predecessors, the Romans:
( I’ve memorized this in Latin, so rich it is with meaning ).
‘Our fathers, worse than our grandfathers, have given birth to us, their more degenerate progeny, who, in our turn, shall become the parents of a generation still viler.’
Horace, Odes