Pastors group protests city's gay festival

The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS -- Christian pastors are leading a protest campaign against an annual gay celebration in the French Quarter that they say features lewdness, nudity and public sex.

The Rev. Grant E. Storms, who organized the campaign, has circulated a videotape made at this year's Southern Decadence weekend that he said shows men having sex in the streets of the French Quarter. Storms was one of more than a dozen New Orleans-area pastors who spoke at a City Hall protest on Friday, calling on Mayor Ray Nagin and the City Council to revoke Southern Decadence's permits and ban the festival.

"New Orleans has now earned the reputation of being the new Sodom and Gomorrah, the sewer of the South," Storms said at the protest, which drew about 70 people.

Storms and others paid for an advertisement in The Times-Picayune on Wednesday, saying the festival should be banned.

City officials have not responded to the protests.