On March 12, a quarrel erupted in the queue of a large store in Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine. A young woman, furious to see two men pass in front of her, insulted the couple with a torrent of homophobic remarks, French daily Le Figaro reported.
“You faggots, you do not have the right to live!” she screamed. “In Algeria guys like you have their throats cut,” the young woman continued furiously. Two cashiers who witnessed the scene, testified against her.
“Yes I am homophobic and I don’t care,” the woman shouted in the store. Prosecuted for homophobic death threats, she explained her remarks were caused by fatigue due to her pregnancy. She denied being homophobic, saying at the hearing: “I insulted them as ‘fags’ but if they had been fat it would have been ‘dirty fat’ or a blonde, ‘dumb blonde'”.
She also explained that she was treated as a “bougnoule” by the couple, an assertion that none of the witnesses at the scene could confirm. “Bougnoule” is a negative racial term usually designating North Africa populations.
The Algerian woman had left the queue for a while to go and fetch another product when the gay couple took her place in line, which caused her outburst.
“A death threat is to say to the person that it does not deserve to exist and that’s what you did,” said the lawyer of the two civil parties, Tewfik Bouzenoune. Referring gay marriage, he noted the trivialization of homophobic remarks in the debates surrounding this law. “You are the incarnation of this banalization,” he said.
Two associations fighting against homophobia were civil parties in this case, “an illustration of persistent homophobia,” said Quentin de Margerie, lawyer for SOS Homophobie.
“Some 50 percent of cases of homophobia are manifested in words,” added Etienne Deshoulieres, lawyer for Mousse, another association to fight against homophobic violence. “It’s homophobia everyday, with representatives of latent homophobia in France,” he said.
“My client must answer for her actions, not all the homophobic acts committed in France,” the lawyer of the defendant, Madeleine de Vaugelas, responded.
She asked for the death threats issued by her client to be reclassified as public insults, which the court did not follow. In addition to 4 months suspended sentence, the young woman was sentenced to pay 1350 euros in damages and interest for non-pecuniary damage to each of the victims and 1500 euros to each of the two associations.
La Manif pour tous has been the biggest Catholic opposition group demonstrating against the law opening marriage to same-sex couples, known as “marriage for all”, in France.
Catholic bishops were against the reform and were soon joined by leaders of the Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and Orthodox Christian communities in France. But opinion polls showed a majority of almost 60 percent of the French supported same-sex marriage.
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