The family holiday village operator Center Parcs has pulled its advertising from the Daily Mail after a columnist told readers not to consider same-sex parents as “the new normal”.

The column by Richard Littlejohn, headlined “Please don’t pretend two dads is the new normal”, followed the news that Olympic diver Tom Daley and his husband, the film-maker and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, are expecting their first child.

“Before the usual suspects start bouncing up and down, squealing ‘homophobia’, don’t bother,” he wrote. “I’d rather children were fostered by loving gay couples than condemned to rot in state-run institutions, where they face a better-than-average chance of being abused. That said I still cling to the belief that children benefit most from being brought up by a man and a woman.”

Center Parcs was one of a number of advertisers named by the campaign group Stop Funding Hate, which regularly draws attention to brands that appear next to divisive content in the Daily Mail.

“We take where we advertise very seriously and have a number of steps to prevent our advertising from appearing alongside inappropriate content,” the company said in a tweet. “We felt this placement was completely unacceptable and therefore ceased advertising with the Daily Mail with immediate effect.”

Stop Funding Hate called out a number of other brands that advertised online or in the print edition of the Daily Mail on the day the column was published, including the Southbank Centre, Suzuki, Honda, the Co-op, Natwest, BT’s Plusnet, Boots, Carpetright, Iceland, DFS and Morrisons.

AutoTrader said it had asked its digital advertising team to investigate how its ad appeared and added that it “does not endorse this article”.

“We have measures in place to prevent our ads appearing next to illegal, obscene or inappropriate content,” the company tweeted. “Thank you for pointing this case out to us – our digital advertising team is investigating as we speak.”

Natwest posted: “We take this issue extremely seriously. This is not content sponsored by us. Our ads are served up through a third party and we are investigating why they have appeared here.”

The Southbank Centre has been a major supporter of equal rights, including throwing a mass wedding at its Festival of Love to celebrate the arrival of gay marriage in Britain.

“We reach out to audiences through wide-ranging online and offline media titles, across the political spectrum,” said a spokeswoman for the arts centre. “We monitor the environment in which our advertising appears, to ensure the values of the publication are compatible with our own. We have no future plans to advertise within the Daily Mail.”

The spokeswoman clarified that the UK’s largest arts centre had “not pulled any ads from the Daily Mail, existing or future, we had no future adverts planned”.

A spokesman for the Daily Mail said: “Had any of the political zealots who attacked Richard Littlejohn’s column actually read it they would know that he explicitly supports civil partnerships and the fostering of children by gay couples – hardly evidence of homophobia. Nor is it homophobic to ask whether it is right to deny a child the love of its own mother. It is very sad that an advertiser should give way to bullying by a tiny group of politically motivated internet trolls in their attempts to censor newspapers with which they disagree.”

Last month, Virgin Trains revealed it had stopped selling the Daily Mail after deciding it was “not compatible” with its brand or beliefs.

The Daily Mail complained the move amounted to censorship, prompting Sir Richard Branson to order the train line to start restocking the title.

• This article was amended on 18 February 2018 to include a response from the Daily Mail.

