With tens of thousands of people from around the world planning to visit Central Florida, Orlando, for the Gay Days festivities in early June, religious conservatives from the Sunshine State are warning families not to visit the Magic Kingdom on the first Saturday of the month.

 As they should!  Thank you!

David Caton, the executive director of the conservative Florida Family Association, who has led numerous protests targeting companies that advertise on television shows with questionable and mature content, urged that Disney, which is not sponsoring the event,  to restrict Gay Days activities to after-hours.

Caton noted that his organization had raised enough funds to rent an airplane which would fly over the Orlando area on that Friday and Saturday with banners warning about the event.  REALLY? SERIOUSLY?

Chris Alexander-Manley, the president of Orlando based Gay Days, Inc., welcomed the free publicity that Caton offered the event.

The Gay Day events in Orlando attract over 100,000 gay and lesbian participants to the Disney theme park. It is estimated that approximately $500 million is pumped into the county that week!

The Disney Gay Day event has spawned a number of other events which take place in Orlando during the week, providing a long list of events for gay and lesbian visitors to attend. Many gay and gay friendly hotels in the region offer special deals and packages for the period and this is a great time to visit the area.

“As always, our attendees are expected to behave just like any other guest,” noted Alexander-Manley. “We get great feedback each year from families who didn't know that it was Gay Days and that they were happy their children were able to see the diversity of humanity.”

"It’s offensive to see an organization call on Disney to discriminate against any segment of the population,” said Brian Winfield, the communications director of LGBT civil rights group Equality Florida. “Fortunately, Disney is among the 89 percent of Fortune 500 companies that have policies prohibiting anti-gay discrimination. At a time when Florida is desperate for jobs and needs the economic benefits of tourism, we hope that the tens of thousands of gay families who travel to Orlando will be able to enjoy their vacations free of the bigotry demonstrated by this organization.”

Started in 1991, the Gay Days events received national attention when the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott Disney in 1997. The convention lifted the ban in 2005. Prominent televangelist and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson made national headlines back in 1998 when he suggested that God would punish Orlando for hosting Gay Days by unleashing natural and man-made disasters upon the region.