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Report: Copeland running for Conservatives

Sun 3 Aug 2014 In: New Zealand Daily News

Gordon Copeland's former leader says he's a "serial nutter" The man who compared same-sex marriage to apartheid will reportedly stand for the Conservative Party again. Former United Future MP Gordon Copeland will be the candidate in Hutt South, according to youth politics blog Beehive Mandate. His former leader Peter Dunne described Copeland as a “serial nutter” when he told a Select Committee hearing submissions on marriage equality legislation that allowing gay people to marry was like calling the New Zealand Maori rugby team "honorary whites" in the tour to South Africa. When asked to respond to Copeland standing again, Dunne has tweeted: "I will give that ... the ongoing charity of my silence." Copeland stood split from United Future to start the short-lived Kiwi Party in 2007. He stood in Hutt South for the Conservative Party at the last election and received 3.17 per cent of the electorate vote. In 2005, when he was in Parliament, he introduced a colleague’s bill which sought to define marriage in New Zealand as “heterosexual”. It failed. He voted against any pro-lgbti reform and also made it clear he believed the now wiped “gay panic defence” was “justifiable”. In 2011 he made a submission that the Government's income splitting tax credits legislation should be restricted to heterosexual married couples “because it takes a man and a woman to raise children”. Copeland also once wrote a reflection on spirituality, Faith that Works, where he recounted how he’d been attacked by the devil beside a pool in Bangkok. "A beautiful girl stripped off topless alongside me and covered herself in suntan lotion before diving in for a swim,” he wrote. He’s also admitted burning Grace Jones' music. Meanwhile the Conservative Party, which scored one per cent in the most recent Roy Morgan Poll, is expected to announce Christine Rankin will be its Epsom candidate this afternoon.    

Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff

First published: Sunday, 3rd August 2014 - 2:14pm

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