French presidential candidate slapped with a 4000-euro fine for homophobic comments

Far-right French pundit and failed presidential candidate Éric Zemmour was given a 4,000-euro fine (about $4,200) for anti-LGBTQ+ comments that violated France’s anti-hate speech law.

On October 15, 2019, Zemmour appeared on the show Face à l’info to discuss “Medically assisted reproduction: Progress?” The show aired shortly after France passed a law allowing lesbian couples and single women to access medically assisted reproduction.

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“This is about the whims of a tiny minority that controls the government and enslaves it for its own benefit and is going to disintegrate society,” Zemmour said on the program. “Because we will have children without a father and I just said that it’s a catastrophe and, secondly, who is going to force all the other French people to pay for these whims?”

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The LGBTQ+ organization Stop Homophobie filed a lawsuit against Zemmour and, in late September, a judge ruled in favor of the organization, TETU reported.

“The comments present a contemptuous image of the people they target,” the judge ruled, “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. Their sexual orientation leads necessarily, according to the defendant, to behavior contrary to the public good,” the ruling stated.

Not only was Zemmour fined, but the director of Face à l’info, Serge Nedjar, was fined 4,000 euros. Zemmour and Nedjar were also ordered to pay 3,000 euros to several LGBTQ+ organizations and 2,000 euros in attorneys’ fees.

Zemmour’s attorney said that he’ll be appealing the decision.

Zemmour ran for president in 2022 on an anti-Islamic and anti-immigration platform. He frequently claimed that France has been in decline since the 1970s due to immigration, feminism, and LGBTQ+ rights. He believes that homosexuality is being spread with LGBTQ+ “propaganda” and compared equal rights for trans students to Nazism. He has called abortion part of France’s “collective suicide,” which includes embracing the euro, no-fault divorce, and halal foods in schools.

Despite the massive media attention he got during the run-up to the election because of his extreme views, he ended up getting 7% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, behind the centrist (and ultimate winner) Emmanuel Macron (28%), right-winger Marine Le Pen (23%), and leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (22%).