Roger-Luc Chayer (Photo: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
The American President Donald Trump is once again targeting homosexuals and LGBTQ+ communities around the world—this time by violating France’s sovereignty.
Last week, the U.S. Embassy in Paris sent a letter to 30,000 French companies, demanding they abandon their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies if they wished to continue doing business with the United States.
What are diversity, equity, and inclusion policies?
According to the Université du Québec à Montréal and the Business Development Bank of Canada, DEI policies aim to create workplaces and social environments where every individual—regardless of origin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or disability—is respected, represented, and treated fairly.
They encourage organizations to acknowledge systemic inequalities and implement concrete measures to address them, particularly by ensuring equitable access to opportunities and valuing differences as strengths. The goal is to build systems where everyone can fully participate and contribute, free from prejudice or discrimination.
These policies are applied not only in professional settings but also in public, educational, and cultural institutions. They seek to transform both mentalities and practices, placing human dignity and social justice at the heart of decision-making.
Here we go again—just like in 1940!
The persecution of homosexuals is nothing new. Another dictator in Germany, during the 1930s and 1940s, also made LGBTQ+ people a prime target. One remembers the pink triangle, crudely stitched onto the uniforms of prisoners suspected of homosexuality, who were sent to concentration camps before and during World War II.
The pink triangle was a symbol used by the Nazi regime to identify and stigmatize men suspected of being homosexual in the camps. It was sewn onto their uniforms as a badge of shame, isolating them from other detainees and exposing them to especially brutal treatment. This marking was part of a larger classification system meant to rank prisoners according to their perceived “threat level.”
The French solution…
This is not the first time in history that a nation has attempted to intimidate France—and it’s never a good idea. France is fiercely proud of its independence and its long-standing culture of human rights.
Several companies that received the letter—an act seen as a blatant violation of French sovereignty—chose to ignore the demand. Others, seeking to protect their operations, opted to keep their DEI policies underground, in a kind of digital maquis reminiscent of the French Resistance of 1940, while quietly removing them from their public websites.
Google France—The shame of a fallen example
The case of Google France is both shameful and deeply troubling. While the vast majority of French companies refused to comply with the demands of the U.S. president, the French division of the tech giant—once seen as a model employer—chose to abandon its DEI policy. This decision sparked outrage among politicians and labor unions, who see it as an unacceptable capitulation to foreign pressure and a betrayal of the Republic’s core values.
When contacted recently by AFP, Google confirmed it no longer has any hiring targets related to the representation of diverse population groups.
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