- CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP) -- The Christian Coalition and more than a dozen other
U.S. religious groups have launched a national anti-homosexuality campaign
with newspaper ads that describe it as a sin and a mental illness.
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- The ads, which ran this week in USA Today
and the New York Times, include testimonials asking gays and lesbians to
seek redemption within the church. Other ads criticize gay activists
and decry "homosexual recruitment in public schools."
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- "This is a statement of faith that
homosexual acts are sinful," Christian Coalition spokesman Arne Owens
said Wednesday.
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- The campaign is a defence of the conservative
Christian stance against homosexuality, Owens said, and those who see it
as sinful are not bigots but concerned Christians.
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- The Human Rights Campaign Foundation,
which supports gay rights, countered with its own ad in USA Today. It quoted
a Minnesota couple saying, "We're living proof that families with
lesbian and gay kids can be whole, happy and worthy of all this great country
promises."
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- "Jesus welcomed everyone and didn't
put any conditions on who you are or who you need to be," added Ann
Carlson, founder of a local congregation of homosexual Episcopalians. "It
can cause a lot of harm to discuss something as a disease or a sin when
it's not."
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