A Christian group running an ad campaign on the TTC has pulled a poster that asks “Does God care if I’m gay?”

The website listed at the bottom of the ad went to a page that stated, in part, “We know from passages throughout Scripture that God hates homosexual acts….” It was part of a campaign of 24 religious questions being posed by Bus Stop Bible Studies, a Toronto-based group that runs transit ads in a number of Ontario cities.

The posters went onto the outside of busses and streetcars on March 18. On Wednesday, the TTC said it was reviewing the ad after a number of complaints. Later Wednesday, Bus Stop Bible Studies took the long response to the gay question off its website.

A replacement statement read, in part, “It has become apparent that, while one is free to ask the question, ‘Does God care if I’m gay?’ one is not so free to answer the question from a Biblical perspective.”

On Thursday, Bus Stop Bible Studies president David Harrison told the Star that while the rest of the campaign would keep running, the “Does God care if I’m gay?” poster was being taken down. “It seems that some are offended that the question should even be asked,” he said via email.

In an interview Wednesday, Harrison suggested that same-sex couples who were legally married were still sinners. “Who made same-sex marriage legal?” he asked, “God or man?”

Under the Ontario Human Rights Code, the TTC can’t automatically reject advertising by religious groups. However, Ontario Human Rights Commission spokeswoman Pascale Demers said ad sellers do have the right to turn down specific ads that discriminate against groups protected by the human rights code.

“The Human Rights Code does not oblige anyone to take on ads from any person or group,” said Demers.

TTC spokesman Brad Ross said that the commission’s advertising committee looked at the listed website before approving the ad, but the page was not yet live. The campaign is earning the transit system $30,000 of its annual $15 million in ad revenue.

“We need to sort out what we mean by religious freedom,” said Rev. Brent Hawkes of the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, which performs same-sex marriages. Hawkes called the message on the Bus Stop Bible Studies page “despicable” and “an abysmal interpretation of scripture.”

“Religious freedom was first put in the human rights code to protect the right to worship without interference from the government,” said Hawkes. “It was not meant to protect people who use religion to attack others.”

On the website, a writer who says he helped generate questions for the campaign, and who identifies himself as “MDB” and openly gay, says in a note to “concerned riders of the TTC” that “there was great sensitivity given to my feelings regarding the passages that were posted for this question. … I do not endorse or agree with the response, but am tolerant and understand the answer’s origin. We as homosexuals ask for tolerance of our lifestyles, so we must also respect the lifestyles of others. For that is true equality.”

If the TTC had rejected the campaign, or just the single ad referring to being gay, Bus Stop Bible Studies could have made a formal complaint alleging religious discrimination, at which point the case would have been heard by the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

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In 2009, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that two B.C. transit agencies http://www.vancouversun.com/story_print.html?id=1778607&sponsor=did not have the right to reject political advertising. TransLink and BC Transit had turned down ads from the Canadian Federation of Students and the B.C. Teachers Federation because they could “cause offence to any person or group of persons or create controversy.”

The transit authorities did not have the right for a “blanket exclusion of a highly valued form of expression in a public location that serves as an important place for public discourse,” said Justice Marie Deschamps at the time.