LGBT Taliban makes Christians miss the Blackpool bus
by Andrew Tettenborn, The Conservative Woman:
It’s difficult to be neutral in the culture wars these days. Events last week in Blackpool provided a neat vignette of the times we live in.
As in many other places, there is an annual Gay Pride jamboree in the town. This year it was on the weekend of 8-11 June; as it had done before, the bus and tram company Blackpool Transport (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the council) gave the celebration its blessing and obligingly provided a bus, garishly decked out, to act as one of the floats in the grand parade.
So far so good. Payback time came a month later. In and about this coming September, an event known as the Lancashire Festival of Hope takes place. Organised by a coalition of evangelical Christians and local churches of various denominations, it consists of rallies, prayer walks, and Christian life and witness teaching for young and old. Publicity was (and is) considerable, and it included banner ads on the sides of Blackpool’s buses and trams. Or rather: until last week it did. The problem was that one of the elements of the festival was to be an address in the Winter Gardens from Franklin Graham, the evangelistic preacher (and son of Billy Graham) who is strongly opposed to homosexuality. LGBT activists were not impressed and organised a concerted protest to Blackpool Transport. The result was an abject apology from that body for even thinking of accepting advertising from the Festival of Hope, and a promise that not only all ads for the event would go, but that to protect the citizens of Blackpool from ‘heightened tension’ and to avoid causing offence, any vehicles carrying them would be taken off the road and kept off until they were expunged.
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