World’s ‘biggest’ gay pride march shrinks dramatically: politicians abandon
une 20, 2012 ( LifeSiteNews.com ) - With financial and moral support from the country’s highest authorities, Brazil ’s “gay pride” marches have long been billed as the largest in the world, with the city of Sao Paulo boasting the number one spot. Generous estimates by the government’s Military Police offered the seemingly impossible figures of between 2.5 and four million participants at the annual event, a figure enthusiastically seconded by parade organizers and dutifully repeated by the international media. However, this year’s parade offered a starkly different picture. Following a study commissioned by the Datafolha Institute by the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper in 2011, which exposed the wildly-inflated nature of last year’s attendance figures, the Military Police are refusing to give any estimate of the attendance for this year’s parade. The Datafolha Institute, however, says that the 2012 LGBT Pride Parade brought in only 270,000 people, a number that represents a small