By Kathleen Gilbert
BRISBANE, Queensland, August 9, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A pro-family candidate for an Australian senate is standing by statements in which she called gay “marriage” a form of child abuse, after being deluged with vitriol from homosexualists and derogatory media coverage.
Wendy Francis, who is campaigning for a senate seat in Queensland, stated on her Twitter account Sunday: “Gay marriage = kids with no mothers or no fathers, parent-less generation; uncontrollable depression & suicide. Is that the Aust[ralia] we want?” Francis also wrote: “Children in homosexual relationships are subject to emotional abuse. Legitimising gay marriage is like legalising child abuse,” and: “Australia would never recover from legalising gay marriage. Those who advocate this are not thinking of the dramatic consequences.” Francis confirmed in a later interview that she approved the tweets.
The candidate has made no secret of her support for true marriage: Francis is associated with Family First, an Australian political party that stands on unabashedly pro-family principles. Yet the outrage over what have been called “gay slurs” forced the candidate to remove the messages from her Twitter page, although she says she stands by them.
Several Twitter users reacted in fury: Demand Equality, a small American homosexualist group, wrote on Twitter: “@Wendy4Senate too bad your children didn't have a choice and got stuck with a heterosupremacist tyrannical theocrat bully for a mother.” Other users hurled abusive and vulgar language at Francis, calling her a “stupid bigot” and an “f***ing moronic redneck c***.”
Senthorun Raj, policy and development coordinator at the Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby, told the Herald that Francis' statements “[promote] attitudes of homophobia.”
But Francis later defended the statements to the Herald, and said that she personally deleted the tweets because the backlash was overwhelming her staff.
“I am not homophobic,” she said. “It is one thing to be homosexual; it's another thing altogether to then impose that on children. And I personally do not agree that kids being brought up with a gay couple as surrogate parents is in the best interests of the children.”
Francis also insisted that involving children in the “social experiment” on marriage is clearly “emotional child abuse.”
“If we use children in any other social experiment, I think people would agree with me that it is child abuse,” she said.
The candidate compared children handed over to homosexual couples to those Australian Arborigines who were removed from their parents by the Australian government in the 19th and 20th centuries – known collectively as the Lost Generation.
“We had a stolen generation and we saw that that social experiment left children confused, they were without the right to have their mother and father, and for me I think the right of the child is to have a mother and a father,” she said.
Although the homosexual lobby frequently insists that children raised by homosexual couples are no different from those raised in heterosexual households, several studies have indicated otherwise. In addition to studies finding pedolphiles drastically overrepresented among homosexuals, a study published in the scholarly journal Adolescence, as cited by the Family Research Council, found that 29 percent of the adult children of homosexual parents had been subjected to sexual molestation. Only 0.6 percent of adult children of heterosexual parents reported sexual relations with a parent in the same study.
“This is a social experiment, and we do not know yet what this experiment is going to end up doing to our children,” said Francis, who said her remarks focused on the potential for “emotional abuse.” “We are talking about a parentless generation.”
See related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Special report: Same-Sex Parenting is Harmful to Children Says REAL Women of Canada
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/apr/040428c.html
Report Shows Link Between Homosexuality and Child Abuse
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2002/may/02053107.html