Pacquiao draws flak on social media for comparing gays to animals
MANILA: Sarangani rep and senatorial candidate Manny Pacquiao compared the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community to animals, promptly getting himself flak on social media at the start of the 2016 elections campaign.
In an interview with the TV5 group for its “Bilang Pilipino” elections coverage, Pacquiao said that “common sense” would tell you that there are no animals who engage in sex with the same gender.
By analogy, then, if persons engage in same-sex relations, then they are worse than animals, Pacquiao added.
Despite Pacquiao’s claims of “common sense,” however, studies have shown that even animals engage in homosexual behaviour.
A boxing champion and a “born again” Christian pastor, Pacquiao made the statement at the height of the national campaign for his senatorial bid under the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) of Jejomar Binay.
Pacquiao has been missing the campaign trail since it started Feb 9 to prepare for his fight with Timothy Bradley in April.
But he has ranked quite high on the voters’ preference polls, getting in the “magic 12” of senators in the coming 2016 elections.
According to the latest Pulse Asia survey conducted on Jan 24 to 28, Pacquiao got in the eight to 10th rank, getting 46.9% of respondents.
The video of the interview has since gone viral on social media, garnering over 1.1 million views. So far, it has over 22,000 shares and 12,400 likes.
Netizens on Twitter went to the point of urging voters not to elect Pacquiao to the Senate.
“Hope the LGBT community spearheads a campaign to keep Pacquiao off the Senate. We don’t need another bigot there,” Cecila (@ceso) said.
“Imagine how many gay boxers and gay athletes’ hearts Manny Pacquiao just broke,” added netizen Jaythan Edrick (?@ morejaythanyou).
Hollywood gossip columnist Perez Hilton made a comment about Pacquiao comparing gays to animals.
“What?! Why do people have to compare homosexuality to animals?! WHY?? Ugh,” he said on his blog (PerezHilton.com).
“Look, if your religious beliefs prevent you from accepting samesex marriage, that’s on you. That’s YOUR idea of propriety. But there’s absolutely no call to demonize and denigrate gay people by comparing them to animals just because their love is something YOU’RE unable to accept,” he added.
Hilton said probably the worse thing is the fact that Pacquiao could easily win a Senate seat despite his views on same sex marriage.
“The sad thing here is that Pacquiao is world famous and a national hero as a boxer, so we can only guess he’ll win his election to the Senate pretty easily – and then spread this awful attitude around within his country. Double ugh,” Hilton said.
One netizen backed up Pacquiao for his anti-gay remarks.
“Manny doesn’t say that being a gay or lesbian per se is a sin. It’s the act that he is pointing out,” said kitkpau (@paulocadungon).
Later, in a 47-second Facebook video uploaded on Tuesday night, Pacquiao said sorry for his statement relegating homosexuals as “worse than animals”.
But Pacquiao said he was firm on his stand against same-sex marriage because of what the Bible says. He, however, said he was not condemning LGBT.
“I am humbling myself before you and before God for my mistake. Thank you and God bless,” he added.