P7025376
Baptists preach religious intolerance at Gay Pride marchers. London, 02.07.2011
As this year's London Gay Pride parade made its way from Portland Place, down Regent Street and then on to Trafalgar Square, marchers and onlookers alike were quite shocked and generally offended to discover that there was a demonstration set up at the bottom of Waterloo Place by a group of so-called Christians from the Baptist Church - some of whom looked like they had been time-warped directly from the 1950's, complete with emotional constipation - who spent the entire afternoon insulting and demeaning all gay people and anyone who accepts homosexuality as a part of the enormously wide spectrum of human sexuality by cherry-picking snippets from the Bible - without proper context - and generally showing themselves up to be nothing more than a bunch of hate-filled bigots who laughably claim to love the people they were standing there belittling.
Needless to say the gay marchers responded with a continual torrent of cat-calls, laughter, jeering, rude hand-signals, kissing and even a bit of breast-bearing. All of this was just feeding the Baptist's justification for their prejudice, of course, and clearly this group of ideologically-driven individuals felt somehow emotionally nourished and vindicated by the experience, but the truth is that they came across as petty, arrogant and malicious anachronisms.
When I arrived on the scene two grinning lesbians with three large black umbrellas were pointedly blocking the public's view of the Baptists and as many of the large, lurid yellow placards erected by the religious zealots as they could. A little later on the onlookers erupted in cheers and whistles as two younger girls kissed right in front of the anti-gay demonstrators, and after that a young man demanded a copy of the Bible from the Baptists and proceeded to sit cross-legged on the pavement checking every single quote mentioned on the yellow boards so he could see for himself how the individual phrases had been quoted completely out of context, just to suit the zealots' low opinion. The preachers spent much of their time mentioning the Devil, but in my eyes the Devil was the one holding the microphone, waving a book around, trying to inflict their misery on everyone else...
All photos © 2011 Pete Riches
Do not reproduce, alter or reblog my images without my permission.
Hi-Res versions of these files are available on application
P7025376
Baptists preach religious intolerance at Gay Pride marchers. London, 02.07.2011
As this year's London Gay Pride parade made its way from Portland Place, down Regent Street and then on to Trafalgar Square, marchers and onlookers alike were quite shocked and generally offended to discover that there was a demonstration set up at the bottom of Waterloo Place by a group of so-called Christians from the Baptist Church - some of whom looked like they had been time-warped directly from the 1950's, complete with emotional constipation - who spent the entire afternoon insulting and demeaning all gay people and anyone who accepts homosexuality as a part of the enormously wide spectrum of human sexuality by cherry-picking snippets from the Bible - without proper context - and generally showing themselves up to be nothing more than a bunch of hate-filled bigots who laughably claim to love the people they were standing there belittling.
Needless to say the gay marchers responded with a continual torrent of cat-calls, laughter, jeering, rude hand-signals, kissing and even a bit of breast-bearing. All of this was just feeding the Baptist's justification for their prejudice, of course, and clearly this group of ideologically-driven individuals felt somehow emotionally nourished and vindicated by the experience, but the truth is that they came across as petty, arrogant and malicious anachronisms.
When I arrived on the scene two grinning lesbians with three large black umbrellas were pointedly blocking the public's view of the Baptists and as many of the large, lurid yellow placards erected by the religious zealots as they could. A little later on the onlookers erupted in cheers and whistles as two younger girls kissed right in front of the anti-gay demonstrators, and after that a young man demanded a copy of the Bible from the Baptists and proceeded to sit cross-legged on the pavement checking every single quote mentioned on the yellow boards so he could see for himself how the individual phrases had been quoted completely out of context, just to suit the zealots' low opinion. The preachers spent much of their time mentioning the Devil, but in my eyes the Devil was the one holding the microphone, waving a book around, trying to inflict their misery on everyone else...
All photos © 2011 Pete Riches
Do not reproduce, alter or reblog my images without my permission.
Hi-Res versions of these files are available on application