The controversial Destiny Church is hosting a 'big gay disco' today, though not by choice.
Protest spokesperson Wayne Baker says it's important the gay community pushes back."We just want to make a strong show of support in front of their church - that the LGBT community isn't going to tolerate or put up with bigotry."
The event page on Facebook says: "Whilst most of the NZ LGBT community seems to have taken this with a grain of salt and laughed it off (which is great), it is the LGBT youth who might be questioning their gender identity and sexuality who might take this more seriously and as we know, suicide in our community is still a massive issue."
In a fiery sermon posted to Facebook hours before the November 14 earthquake, Mr Tamaki told his congregation that the world "convulses under the weight of certain human sin".
"The land actually speaks to God. Out of the soil - Abel's blood spoke to God from a murder. The earth can speak. Leviticus says that the earth convulses under the weight of certain human sin," he said.
"It spews itself up after a while - that's natural disasters. Because nature was never created to carry the bondage of our iniquity."
Another MP has laid into Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki's comments about homosexuality causing earthquakes, saying he's damaging young gay people.
Wellington-based National list MP Paul Foster-Bell said he was prompted to talk publicly about his sexuality because the comments made him "furious".
He felt that as a gay member of the National government, he had a moral obligation to speak out.
The day before last month's magnitude-7.8 Kaikoura quake, Mr Tamaki gave a sermon in which he claimed quakes were caused by sin building up and spewing out of the ground. He hasn't backed down since then.
Mr Foster-Bell said that for young people growing up in provincial New Zealand, like he did, it was "throwing petrol on a fire when you send out a message that gay people are very similar to murderers, they're sinners, and they're creating natural disasters".
"You and I can dismiss that as intelligent adults as just being ludicrous, but for those kids, that's actually a really hurtful thing at an already difficult time in their life," he told TVNZ's Q+A programme.
Labour's Grant Robertson, also gay, has described Mr Tamaki as "a ridiculous, irrelevant bigot".
Both Prime Minister John Key and Human Rights Commissioner Richard Tankersley have also rejected the idea that homosexuality causes earthquakes as ignorant.
Newshub.
