A few thousand protesters tried to drown out tens of thousands of participants in a pride parade in the South Korean capital — and failed to kill the party.
SEOUL — Tens of thousands of people marched through the South Korean capital in an LGBT pride festival on Sunday, despite attempts by Christian groups to shut it down.
The atmosphere was defiantly jubilant at the parade, the culmination of the three-week long Korean Queer Culture Festival.
Christian groups have been running a campaign for weeks to try to block the parade. In May, they camped out for a week in front of the police station where parade organizers had to apply for a permit and filed a competing request to hold an event in the same place. Police initially responded by canceling the parade citing the conflicting permit applications, but a court ruled on June 17 that the parade had to be allowed.
The Seoul police deployed thousands of officers to keep order between the queer festival — which began in a large grassy plaza in front of city hall — and eight counter protests that entirely surrounded the area. Here's what happened.
The largest of the the counter-protests was organized by a coalition including some of Korea's largest Christian church associations, which joined together as the Korean Churches Anti-LGBT Response Committee.
The group held a worship service across the street from the Queer Festival, blasting hymns, prayers, and sermons so loudly that at times it overwhelmed the festival's sound system. The organizers had predicted that 30,000 people would participate in the service, but the actual number appeared to number around 2,000.
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"Our prayers will open the sky and the homosexuals will fall, we will be blessed with victory," said Lee Young-hoon, head of the leading organization in the anti-LGBT coalition.
Lee, who is pastor of the Yoido Full Gospel megachurch in Seoul, heads the Christian Council of Korea, which claims to represent 60,000 churches with 12 million members.
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They handed out visors that said, "Oppose homosexual provocation."
The sign on their laps from the Korea Presbyterian Assembly says, "We pray for korea not to be diseased/sick with homosexuality."
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