An Aussie Senate candidate for Family First Wendy Francis has been forced to stand by her comments that legitimising gay marriage was "legalising child abuse". Francis made the comments on Twitter and hoped that she would be able to delete them fast enough before anyone noticed.

She has been doing her best lately to suggest that she is not a Right Wing loony and comments like this on Twitter did not really seem to help her case much. So, after deleting the comments she was a little stunned to discover that most of Australia's press were chasing her for a quiet word.

The comments were "Children in homosexual relationships are subject to emotional abuse. Legitimising gay marriage is like legalising child abuse." She denied that she has deleted the comments because they made her look bad, but rather because she had a really small number of people helping me and we were just getting overwhelmed" by the number of responses to it.

She said she was not homophobic. “"It is one thing to be homosexual; it's another thing altogether to then impose that on children.” Francis said that it was not in the best interests of the children to be bought up by gay parents. She said that was “emotional child abuse”.

Asked why she stood by her statements even though she deleted them, she said that the last thing that she wanted to do was "be unkind to people". She said it is every child's right is to have a mother and a father.