Meet my lawyers ...

The final vote was given last night by the French Senat ... so the next one who's gonna call me a "faggot" will hear from our lawyers and will face $60,000 fine and maybe one year in jail if I am in a really bad mood that day ;-)
ps : please leave your real email adress, that would facilitate the procedure !

Read a funny satire about this law made by the Spoof !
"President Bush : This law is fundament-al-al-ly wrong … I feel it is our moral responsibility to ensure that the French are liberated. Therefore we propose a 24-hour time zone in which Chirac can stand down as President, or else the coalition will invade France, in order to make the world a safer place ...”

UPDATE 24 Dec. :

The government drafted the law after a young gay man was brutally attacked. After he was beaten his assailants poured gasoline on him and set him on fire leaving him severely burned.

According to this law no-one can be punished for just words but only if it takes the harassment further.

Comments

[Richard the Yankee]

I don't believe in that law, it viloates free speech.

[Boss]

Insults and hate are not free-speech-expressions, are crimes.

I'm very happy for this :)

[cafegogo]

The thought-police are alive and well in France. Let's burn "Madame Bovary!"

[Richard the Yankee]

Well I do disagree with this law and I really don't care what people call me. That just show their ignorance. Stck and stones will break my bones....

[Boss]

Richard so to you is more important your right to insult and threaten, than your right to not to be insulted or threatend?

That simplistic view of what "free speech" is all about was the same that permitted the growing of nazism for example. Following your simplistic point of view I could say any lie I wanted, that it would be only "free speech".. Like calling a fake alarm bomb.. free speech right?

[cafegogo]

No, Boss, crying out "fire" or "bomb" in a crowded theatre is not protected free speech in any country that I know of; here I'm afraid it's you who are being simplistic.

Free speech means that the Ku Klux Klan can have a march in the town square, even though I violently disagree with them, just as a Gay Pride parade is allowed.

And that free speech should extend to a comic performer's free right, for instance, to use terms such as "fudgepacker" or "percy-pants," if he or she likes (I'm partial to "percy-pants," lol!). Or a gay comic's right to call straight people "lowly breeders." And it should extend to me or anyone else having the right to insult someone as long as I do not accompany this with violent intent or action.

The French law goes WAY too far in the guise of political correctness.

[Aaron]

I see a lot of frivolous lawsuits.

It says that the new bill "adds sexuality to an existing law banning hate speech against other minorities."

I have no issue with the "protection of minorities", but who is protecting the majority? You can say gay, you can't say black, you can barely call a female a "girl", Indians perfer "native americans", you can't disagree with someone about their religion... etc, etc, etc. On the otherhand it is ok to call me whitie, it's ok to talk about hetrosexuals or call a person straight, metrosexual, hetro or breeder.

Now if I go to France and say the word "faggot", I go to jail?

In the USA it use to be funny to show a sitcom about black people in the ghetto (the Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, etc) but now its incorrect. In fact, if you make any race other than a white person look silly you are slapped with lawsuits and boycotts, yet we laugh every week at Will and Grace (horrible) and other programs about stupid white folk.

The french have gone a bit too far this time.

[pUtoFisH]

Free speech isn't about letting people say whatever they want to, as Boss said! It's about letting people express their opinions without attacking others!
The minorities who are attacked and injured are the ones who need protection, not the implemented majority!
As an example, haven't you notices that the suicide rate for gay teenagers is frighteningly higher than that for the heterossexual ones?? Do you want me to give you one good reason for that (not the only one, of course)? The answer is really simple: gay bashing!
I don't really feel good hearing so many people calling me names, telling I'm some sort of freak, even if I do not believe them!
The great majority, obviously, isn't exposed to this kind of constant attacks, so I don't really see why they need protection! This is simply a measure to seek real equality, not to turn minorities into freak shows people look and laugh at!

[Toby]

Face it, the French do not enjoy the same civil liberties as those in the U.S. They've clamped down on religion (banning Scientology, banning religious garb in schools) and now they're slowly destroying the concept of free speech. To support this law is to be selfish, close-minded and ignorant to the implications.

[Octavio]

This is a clear example of how the French are regulating themselves into the absurd.

The same absurdity seems the theme for the European Union. I live in the reddest of red states - Utah - in Salt Lake City where I'm certain the Mormons would sooner put people like me at the bottom of the Sale Lake rather than share an elevator with a sodomite.

I am not exactly a flag waving patriot, I am embarassed by the ignorance of my countrymen (playing smear the queer at the ballot box in 11 states, George W. Bush borrowing his geo-political strategies from the diaries of Adolf Hitler and V.I. Lennin) but the French are destroying free expression.

France is not a free society.