Voting has opened for the 2013 Gay & Lesbian Outrageous Ridiculous and Ignorant comment Awards.

NSW Labor Upper House member Penny Sharpe has opened the voting for the fourth annual GLORIAs

The GLORIA’s is a fun event that shines a light on outrageous, ignorant and plainly ridiculous public comments made about gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex (GLBTI) people in our community every day.

There are eight categories in which people can vote – Media, Sport, Politics, Law, Religion, Online, International and Silliest GLBTI comments made from within the GLBTI community.

Some of the winners from the 2012 awards were:

Philip Pocock, ACT Election Candidate:
“I believe sodomy of man or woman should be regarded as a criminal offence and while people do not have the right to go ‘poofter bashing’, to use colloquial language, they should have the right to discriminate in terms of employment, accommodation etc as they do in dealing with drug addicts etc”.

Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina who told his congregation that they should build a large fence,150 or 100 miles long, put all the gays and lesbians inside it: “And have that fence electrified ’til they can’t get out. Feed ’em. And you know what, in a few years, they’ll die out. Do you know why? They can’t reproduce.”

Miranda Devine wrote that “As a Catholic, I believe the push for same-sex marriage is not about enhancing the lives of gay couples. In countries where it has been legalised, there has been no rush to the altar. The issue is largely symbolic. It is simply a political tool to undermine the last bastion of bourgeois morality – the traditional nuclear family. You only had to see the burning streets of London last week to see the manifestation of a fatherless society”.