Peter LaBarbera, president of the
Illinois-based Americans for Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), has
criticized a gay wedding expected to take place during Wednesday's
annual Rose Parade in Pasadena, California.
Danny Leclair, 45, and Aubrey Loots,
42, of Los Angeles plan to marry aboard a float sponsored by the AIDS
Healthcare Foundation (AHF). The wedding will mark the parade's
first same-sex marriage in its 125 year history. However, the
parade's first live wedding took place in 1989.
“The 'gay wedding' float is symbolic
of America's ongoing moral disintegration: In the name of
'tolerance,' 'diversity' and 'inclusion,' we proudly parade our sin
down our streets – defying our Creator and aggressively corrupting
the minds and souls of future generations,” LaBarbera said in a
press release. “As historians have documented, sexual immorality,
escalating fornication and the abandonment of fidelity in marriage
bring about the collapse of civilizations; the United States will be
no exception.”
A Facebook page calling for a boycott
of the parade has attracted more than 5,600 followers as of Tuesday
morning.
“Now gay activists want to destroy
the Rose Parade by performing a Gay Wedding on one of the floats,”
the group Boycott
the 2014 Rose Parade said on Facebook.
“I guess that's what they mean by
'Dreams come True' or is it nightmares?” the group added, a
reference to the parade's theme.
Rose Parade officials, though, praised
the AHF's float: “Like all of our sponsors and float designers, AHF
continues to help make the Rose Parade a premier event through
original and creative expressions that connect to parade themes –
as this float does.”
According to the Pasadena
Star News, Leclair and Loots will exchange vows atop a
wedding cake-shaped float “decorated in white coconut chips and
maroon-colored kidney beans with white roses and dendrobium orchids”
and bearing the group's theme of “Love is the Best Protection.”