By Hilary White
LONDON, February 8, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The UK’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) earlier this week ruled that a poster by a Christian family organization broke rules on “social responsibility, decency, matters of opinion and truthfulness”, the BBC reports.
Arguing that the “modern family” is unlikely to include married couples and their children, the ASA spokesman said, “We considered the statement and the way it appeared was likely to cause offence both to the mainstream gay community and supporters of equality.”
The offending poster appeared as part of the campaign surrounding protests last year of the Sexual Orientation Regulations (SORs) that made it illegal for Christian services, including schools and adoption agencies, to refuse homosexual clients. It was displayed as a mobile billboard on the side of a van during protests in 2007 outside Parliament, when both Houses were debating the SORs. The van was driven around London bearing the slogan “Gay Aim: Abolish the Family”, and showing a picture of a man, woman and two children.
But the “offending” words come not from the Christian organization but the homosexual movement itself, and the Christian Congress for Traditional Values (CCTV) that created the poster is not apologizing.
Speaking to the BBC television news, a representative of CCTV, Philip Whealy said, “This poster was based on a direct quote from the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto. The gay aim in that was clearly stated to be to abolish the heterosexual family.”
Whealy was interviewed on BBC News 24 on Wednesday, together with a representative from Stonewall, Britain’s foremost homosexual activist group. “What I have never heard is any renunciation or denial or condemnation of that agenda set out in that Gay Liberation Front Manifesto, from Stonewall, from Outrage!, from any other gay activist group whatsoever,” Whealy said.
Whealy said that the CCTV was “absolutely reasonable to draw people’s attention to the hateful speech that is contained in that manifesto.”
Whealy pointed to an admission by Peter Tatchell, a prominent campaigner for gay equality through the “direct action” group OutRage!, who admitted that all the gains made by the homosexual activist lobby in the last 30 years have been based on the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto. Most of the homosexual activist organizations in Britain formed from the original core group making up the Gay Liberation Front, which was founded in the early 1970’s.
The representative of Stonewall, appearing on the same programme, however, distanced his organization from the intentions of the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto and said that the aims of the homosexual movement have changed since the document was produced. Derek Munn, Director of Public Affairs for Stonewall, said that the document “bore very little relation to the values and the work that Stonewall and other lesbian and gay activists are pursuing today.”
Whealy responded, however, that “leading gay activists” currently “openly and quite happily have aligned themselves with the aims and agenda of that document.”
Watch the BBC interview on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEM2D2FgcaQ