Posted on 12/08/2004 6:09:23 PM PST by Pikamax
Comedians say gag is no laughing matter From Charles Bremner in Paris
FRENCH comedians, worried that they might be out of a job, sided with freedom-of-speech advocates yesterday after Parliament passed a law that makes it an imprisonable offence to insult homosexuals and women.
Jokes about blondes, La Cage aux Folles — the hit show and film about camp gays — and even the Old Testament could be banned under the law, suggested critics who said that political correctness was running riot in France.
“We are plunging ever more into le politiquement correct,” Laurent Ruquier, a star television comedian, said, using an expression imported in the 1990s from America. “You are not allowed to mention anything or anyone,” Ruquier said, noting that he is himself gay.
The unease is being felt on both the Right and the Left as France follows the US and Britain down the path of trying to stamp out the potential for causing offence to minorities of any kind.
In Britain the comedian Rowan Atkinson has joined the fight against government plans to criminalise incitement of religious hatred, arguing that comics must be free to lampoon religion and religious leaders.
The Catholic church opposed the new French law and some critics on the Left said that the State was resorting to the methods of the Thought Police of George Orwell’s 1984.
Meanwhile, France Soir warned its readers to avoid the most common French insults: “Calling a woman mal baisée (sexually frustrated) or uttering a homophobic enculé (a***hole) could cost you six months’ jail.”
Last month the National Human Rights Commission urged the Government to abandon the Bill that outlaws sexist and homophobic insults.
“If it is adopted, we will face difficulty defining insults and will thus have to condemn words. Certain films, books and even the Bible could come under its terms,” said the state body.
The centre-right Government of President Chirac ignored the advice, redrafting the Bill but leaving in place the maximum six months in prison and £15,000 fine for “defaming a person or a group of persons on account of their sex or their sexual orientation”.
In a stormy parliamentary session, rebel MPs from M Chirac’s Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) inserted the handicapped as another protected minority but this is likely to be dropped by the Senate.
The new law, which also includes penalties for incitement, puts sexual insults into the same framework as longstanding laws against racist and anti-Semitic speech and denying the Holocaust.
The Bill also creates a high authority for combating all “discriminations”.
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”.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the UMP leader, said that the new law was “reasonable and respects liberty”. However, a dissident minority of his own conservative MPs said that the Government was trying to police speech and legislate on language. Christine Boutin, a conservative Catholic UMP member, said that the Government was “setting up a morality police”. Jean-Pierre Ricard, head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, also took issue. “Will it still be possible to say that we do not consider heterosexuality and homosexuality to be on the same level?” he asked. “Debate should be free.”
France is returning to moral legislation of the type that led to the 19th-century prosecution of Gustave Flaubert for publishing Madame Bovary, his novel on female adultery, Michel Erman, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Burgundy, said. The best reaction to an insult was not prosecution but a witty rejoinder, he wrote in Libération. Le Nouvel Observateur, weekly bible of the thinking classes, offered readers a list of “insults that can still be used without risk of ruin or prison”. Blonde jokes are out “because they are a degrading attack on a category of the female gender which does not always have the means to choose its hair colour”.
"...puts sexual insults into the same framework as longstanding laws against racist and anti-Semitic speech and denying the Holocaust."
Once you start down the road of dumb, anti-speech laws, it's hard to stop.
Guess that Scotches my next trip to Gay Paris!
Hey! we told you to knock off the Gay Bashing ;>
The french have no sense of humor, and thats the LAW.
What a horrible place to live, where nothing is funny, God is banned and Muslims run rampant with crime.
Sounds like they are ahead of America.
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