Brody's Notes... Australian Senate Candidate Stands By Anti-Gay Comments

By Brody Levesque (Washington DC) AUG 9 | Australian Senatorial Candidate Wendy Francis is apparently standing by comments that were credited to her official campaign Twitter account, even as the chairman of her political party disavowed those tweets as being made by an unnamed staffer who has since been 'counseled' according to Family First Party Chair Bob Day in an live  radio interview with Australia's Channel 7 News programme published by The Age newspaper in Melbourne.

According to The Age correspondent Ben Grubb in an update published in a syndicated article:

"Senate candidate for Family First Wendy Francis today stood by comments she made then deleted on social networking website Twitter, on which she compared legitimising gay marriage to "legalising child abuse".

She went even further in an interview today, comparing children from same-sex families with the stolen generations.

Ms Francis, Family First's lead Senate candidate in Queensland, said in a Twitter message yesterday: "Children in homosexual relationships are subject to emotional abuse. Legitimising gay marriage is like legalising child abuse."

Ms. Francis also participated in a live radio interview reaffirming her stance on the issue: 

"The gay slur thing; I am not homophobic. 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."

Grubb also reports that when asked to clarify that she removed the comment, not because she regretted it, but because she was inundated with responses, she said:

"I think people interpreted it as me saying something that I wasn't saying. Can I say that? I don't want to say that I went too far because I still believe that the best thing for the child is to have a mother and a father and I do believe that this is a social experiment that, if we used children in any other social experiment, people would agree that that was emotional child abuse."