Around 5,000 people gathered outside the Canadian Parliament today to protest against plans to legalize gay marriages, an increasingly controversial move that has badly split the ruling Liberal Party.
The federal government has already drawn up draft legislation on same sex marriages and submitted it to the Supreme Court for an opinion, prompting anger from critics who say Prime Minister Jean Chretien is moving too fast.
"Woe be to those who call evil good and good evil," Roman Catholic priest Francois Beyrouti told the crowd to large cheers. Calgary's Roman Catholic bishop said last month that Mr Chretien was risking his eternal salvation.
The protesters, many of them from the Chinese community, stood on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and waved banners with slogans such as "Do not validate a mad social engineering scheme" and "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."
"We're hoping the message will get across to the members of Parliament just how annoyed and angry Canadian citizens are over their tampering with the definition of marriage which has stood for 7,000 years," said protest organizer Mr Tim Dooling.
"(That definition) was good enough for the parents and grandparents of every one of those members of Parliament, yet it's not good enough for them in their decision to become trendy."
Ottawa decided to act in June when an Ontario court threw out the heterosexual-only definition of marriage as unconstitutional. A court in British Columbia followed suit and Quebec courts are expected to make the same ruling soon.