Former French Presidential candidate Éric Zemmour has been fined under France’s hate-speech laws … again. Although this is one of many times that he has said something outright awful about a marginalized group, this is the third time he has been fined for it, although he was acquitted six other times for doing much of the same.
In the past, Zemmour has been a noted far-right political figure, making shockingly racist and queerphobic remarks, often on live television and in his writings. In 2022, he ran for president on a platform that was blatantly Islamaphobic and anti-immigrant, with him going so far as to call child migrants “thieves, killers … rapists,” and stating that, “We should send them back.” This was an egregious violation of France’s hate speech laws, and following this interview, Zemmour was fined 10,000 euros, which is roughly equal to 10,606 US dollars.
However, Zemmour seems to prefer ignoring his past mistakes over learning from them. This most recent fine is regarding a comment Zemmour made in 2019. He went on a news program called Face à l’info on an episode called “Medically Assisted Reproduction: Progress?” to discuss the recent law that gave lesbian couples and single women access to both easier adoptions and medically assisted reproduction. Zemmour was very opposed to the law, making the misogynistic implication that families without fathers are inherently lesser or doomed than those with fathers.
The judge ruling over the case said of Zemmour’s comments, “The comments present a contemptuous image of the people they target, whose desire to have a child is reduced to a selfish ‘whim.’ They become outrageous when they say these people, in order to satisfy their whim, can use their enslavement of the apparatus of the state. In this way, gay people find themselves denigrated in the eyes of the public because of who they are.”
Éric Zemmour was not the only one who was punished for his inflammatory comments, with Serge Nedjar, the director of Face à l’info also being fined a sum of 4,000 euros, or 4,243 U.S. dollars.
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