UKIP suspends councillor who blamed floods on gay marriage
By Nick Levine
UKIP has suspended David Silvester, the councillor who blamed the recent floods blighting Britain on the legalisation of equal marriage.
UKIP leader Nigel Farage told the BBC that Silvester is entitled to his “strong Baptist view of the world”, but had ignored a party request not to do any more media interviews. “So we suspended him, quite rightly,” Farage said. “He’s not a spokesman for the party. I’ve never even met him.”
Silvester, a councillor for Henley on Thames who defected to UKIP from the Conservative Party in 2012 after David Cameron supported equal marriage, made his claims in a letter to his local newspaper the Henley Standard.
He wrote: “The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war.
“I wrote to David Cameron in April 2012 to warn him that disasters would accompany the passage of his same-sex marriage Bill. But he went ahead despite a 600,000-signature petition by concerned Christians and more than half of his own parliamentary party saying that he should not do so.”
Silvester then continued: “Now, even as Cameron sheds crocodile tears on behalf of destitute flooded homeowners, playing at advocate against the very local councils he has made cash-strapped, it is his fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods.
“He has arrogantly acted against the Gospel that once made Britain ‘great’ and the lesson surely to be learned is that no man or men, however powerful, can mess with Almighty God with impunity and get away with it for everything a nation does is weighed on the scaled of divine approval or disapproval. One recent one caused the worst flooding for 60 years. The Christmas floods were the worst for 127 years. Is this just global warming or is there something more serious at work?”
The official position of UKIP is that the party supports same-sex civil partnerships, but opposes equal marriage. The first same-sex marriages in England and Wales will take place in March of this year and Attitude is to mark the occasion with its first ever bookazine, titled Love and Marriage.