Exclusive: A UKIP candidate who claims same-sex marriage should be abolished because people choose to be gay is standing in the former seat of ex-Prime Minister David Cameron.

Electoral filings this week show that the UK Independence Party has picked controversial candidate Alan Craig to run in the seat of Witney.

The seat, which will be defended by Conservative Robert Courts, was represented by former Prime Minister David Cameron from 2001 until his resignation in 2016.

Mr Craig, who has repeatedly referred to the LGBT lobby as the ‘Gaystapo’, came under scrutiny during the 2015 election when it emerged he had ties to ‘gay cure’ practitioners.

PinkNews broke the news that Mr Craig was set to speak at the “Transformation Potential” event for people trying to cure “unwanted same-sex attraction”, hosted by the Core Issues Trust.

Mr Craig, who at the time was UKIP’s PPC for Brent North, dropped out of the event following the PinkNews report. He denies supporting gay cure therapy, but continues to hold anti-LGBT beliefs.

Just a few months ago, Mr Craig he called for a debate on repealing same-sex marriage.

He wrote: “Following Brexit… I’d like to see the gay marriage debate reopened.

“There is now credible peer-reviewed evidence that same-sex parenting is damaging to children compared with that of still-married heterosexual biological parents.

“There is credible evidence too that sexuality is fluid, orientation is not fixed from birth and therefore people are not necessarily ‘born gay’ – the claim that was the central plank of gay marriage campaigners’ platform.

“Also, since the legislation was passed in 2013, the prestigious but liberal Royal College of Psychiatry has been forced by the facts to concede that ‘post-natal environmental factors’ at least partly determine sexual orientation.

“In the light of this and for the sake of our children, I personally reckon we should resurrect the gay marriage debate and consider repealing the same sex marriage Act.

“And if this means that the gay Tory LBC Radio presenter Iain Dale yet again abuses his position and calls me a homophobic bigot on air, it doesn’t matter. He is yesterday and on the wrong side of history.”

The candidate, who is a former leader of the fringe Christian Peoples Alliance, has repeatedly referred to LGBT people evoking Nazi imagery.

In a 2011 blog he wrote: “[The] Gaystapo are now on a roll.

“Their gay-rights storm troopers take no prisoners as they annex our wider culture, and hotel owners and registrars, magistrates, doctors, counsellors and foster parents, grandparents, adoption agencies and traditional street preachers find themselves crushed under the pink jack-boot.

“Thanks especially to the green light from a permissive New Labour government, the gay Wehrmacht is on its long march through the institutions and has already occupied the Sudetenland social uplands of the Home Office, the educational establishment, the politically-correct police, and the Guardianista management of the BBC”

Even in more recent entries he has made shocking comments that do not conform to UKIP’s public stance.

In another entry penned last month he wrote: “The language of morality, virtue-signalling and political correctness is one of the weapons the Left uses to shut down opponents and capture our culture.

“If you opposed David Cameron’s 2013 same-sex marriage legislation, gay activist leaders Ben Summerskill or Peter Tatchell could smear you as a homophobic bigot and you’d find yourself ejected from the media mainstream and excluded from polite metropolitan society.

“At the same time the elite – Conservative’s Cameron, Labour’s Ed Miliband and LibDem’s Nick Clegg, Gramsci’s ‘progressive’ grandchildren and lemming leaders of the political class – could link arms politically and celebrate together the destruction of faithful marriage as understood in these islands for over a thousand years.

He added: “What’s to be done? There is here a great opportunity for UKIP to do again what it does best: ignore the demands of political correctness, stop worrying about tomorrow’s headlines, confront the political establishment head-on and insist on pushing a vital but avoided social issue onto the national political agenda whether the old parties like it or not.

“We did it courageously with Brexit and uncontrolled immigration. We stood boldly alone over grammar schools and gay marriage.

“For the sake of our children let alone the cost to the tax-payer, we should repeat this by tackling the crisis of family breakdown and promoting the traditional stable family. In fact we should become the Party of the Family.”

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