In a reversal that has caught even her closest aides off-guard, Marina Silva, the former environmental minister who shot to the top of the polls after entering Brazil’s presidential contest less than three weeks ago, has declared her opposition to same-sex marriage, reports Fox News Latino.
“We were surprised with the change,” the heretofore coordinator of gay issues for Silva’s campaign, Luciano Freitas, a well-known activist, said going on to confirm that he had resigned. Freitas’ resignation follows that of PSB general secretary Carlos Siqueira, the article goes on to say, who abandoned the campaign after other disagreements with Silva, who was named the party’s candidate 20 days ago following the death in a plane crash of the party’s original nominee, Eduardo Campos.
Brazil, which enacted legislation legalizing civil unions for same-sex couples in 2013, has a burgeoning Pentecostal community of some 20 million. It is also believed that the Brazilian LGBT community numbers roughly the same. Silva, a member of the devout Evangelical Christian faith, raised the ire of many when she said, “Marriage is for people of different sexes.” This comes on the heels of an effort to include pro same-sex marriage in her party platform which many believed she initially supported. Silva added, referring to the plank,that it was a “correction of an earlier mistake.”
As for her chances of becoming Brazil’s next head of state? Fox News Latino has observed that, “Polls indicate that none of the seven candidates will gain the majority needed for outright victory in the Oct. 5 election, thus necessitating a second round of voting Oct. 26. Before Silva joined the contest, the runoff was expected to pit incumbent Dilma Rousseff against then-main challenger Aecio Neves and to result in a second four-year term for the current head of state. Silva, however, has relegated Neves to a distant third and surveys show her beating Rousseff in a runoff.”
Silva, who ran for president in 2010 with the Green Party and came in a distant third, is in a much stronger position today as Evangelicals begin to flex their political muscle in a country that, despite its strong Catholic heritage, has always taken a live-and-let-live attitude on social matters.
