29/10/2020
The French gay magazine Tetu reports that a fifty one year old father has been sentenced to one year's detention at the leisure of the Republic after driving an astonishing eight hundred miles from Strasbourg to Narbonne, where he began threatening his nineteen year old daughter, who had recently come out in a letter home. The Justices heard that the man, who claims “not to have a problem with homosexuality”, threatened the young woman with death. These serious remarks led the young woman to seek refuge in the University Buildings where she studies, and kind University staff contacted the authorities. The court heard testimony from the daughter, her partner and her mother. Meanwhile, the French LGBTQ movement has added its sizeable voice to the outpouring of grief in the country at the assassination of a teacher, Samuel Paty, by a religious fundamentalist, and expressed solidarity with the principles of the Republic, which is based on secularism and the rule of human law over that of religion. Mr Paty was murdered by an Islamist called Abdullakh Anzorov, for discussing free speech and the right of the secular media to criticise and caricature religions and their adherents. Anzorov was from Chechnya, a semi-autonomous warlord dominated statelet within Russia. Radio Free Europe has long reported that the Chechen junta take Russia's notorious homophobia to its logical conclusion and has been murdering gay and transgender people with impunity for years. Dissident groups in Chechnya have helped organise underground escape routes for LGBTQ people fleeing the regime. Anzorov was shot dead by French gendarmes after the murder. The Paris government is to pursue several long term strategies to diffuse religious extremism, reports cable network France24. These include closing down a Pro-Palestinian group that is widely believed to have been a front for Islamist recruitment, and prosecuting religious parents who had used social media to whip up anti-secular and anti-teacher sentiment. LGBTQ groups are hopeful that a renewed commitment to France's secularism will lead to clampdowns on anti-gay activists.
