June 8, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Brazil’s most famous televangelist, Silas Malifaia, led a protest of tens of thousands of Evangelicals outside of the country’s National Congress on Wednesday, in a show of force intended to remind legislators that the country’s Christians are not backing down in the face of initiatives to decriminalize the killing of the unborn and to create homosexual “marriage.”
“Society is free to criticize evangelicals, to criticize Catholics, to criticize deputies,” Malafaia told the crowd, according to Brazilian television network Globo. “But if you criticize homosexual practices, it’s ‘homophobia.’”
Malafaia warned that, with a proposed “anti-homophobia law” that could silence all public manifestations of disagreement with the homosexual lifestyle, “gay activism is seeking to criminalize opinion.” However, he noted, “opinion is not a crime.”
“They’re thinking that we’re a Bolivia, a Venezuela. Here? No! There is a free press here,” he stated.
“The leftists want a new regulatory framework to control the press, the government, and the society,” he said. “They want to silence the people, they want to silence us, and no one is going to shut us up! To shut us up, they’re going to have to tear up the Constitution of Brazil.”
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“They call us ‘fundamentalists,’” Malafaia told the crowd, “because we defend the family, we defend moral values, we are against drugs. Do you know what they are? They are fundamentalists of moral garbage. Write it down: Pastor Silas Malafaia called gay activism the fundamentalism of moral garbage.”
Malafaia also denounced a recent decision by the country’s National Council of Justice (CNJ) to require all of the country’s notaries to register homosexual “marriages,” a decision that is currently being contested in the courts, calling it a “shame” and “an affront to the society, an affront to the majority.”
The rally included numerous Evangelical speakers, many of whom are representatives in the Congress. Among them was Marco Feliciano, whose recent election to the Chamber of Deputies’ Human Rights Committee has sparked outrage from homosexual activists, who denounce Feliciano’s uncompromising opposition to homosexual “marriage” and the gay lifestyle.
The event “is a response to the politicians and to everyone who calls ‘progress’ what is not. It’s retrocession,” Feliciano told Globo. “The family is the foundation of all of society. My presence on the Human Rights Committee is in favor of the family.”
According to organizers, a total of 70,000-100,000 participants attended the march. The country’s military police say they counted 40,000.