Christian bloggers are among those calling for hosting organisation WordPress to remove a rainbow banner from the top of its Australian hosted pages, saying that it makes an unwanted political statement on their sites.
The banner, which was spotted on sites over the weekend, appears at the top of sites when users are logged in. In comments sent to several WordPress users who raised the issue via the organisation’s online support service, ‘rootjosh’, described as a member of staff, said that to “show our support for marriage equality, we’re showing the rainbow bar to all our Australian visitors”. He added that it would remain in place until the survey results are released.
“We absolutely respect your right to publish the content you choose to your site, but the navigation bar styling reflects WordPress.com’s stance as a company…” he said. “If this causes you to choose to leave WordPress.com, we’re sorry to see you go.”
Victorian-based Bruce Wearne, who writes the Nurturing Justice blog – since deleted from the WordPress platform, said he first noticed the banner appear at the top of his site on Saturday night.
“WordPress’ actions are merely an example of superficial political grand-standing from overseas trying to influence the outcome of a survey the political rationale of which is seriously flawed,” he said.
Dr Wearne, who is a Sight contributor, described the response he received when he inquired about the banner via the WordPress messaging system as “no response at all”.
“It is clearly a robotically generated statement that ignores what I have said and proceeds to lecture me – from USA – about what I already know about politics in this, my own country,” he said, adding that claims WordPress can’t remove the banner, which “reflects WordPress.com’s brand”, from individual sites are “laughable”.
“This is simply to hide behind a gutless attempt to reserve the right to exercise their political influence to over-ride the rights of those using their platform outside the USA when they deem it is necessary to do so,” he said. “This is a violation pure and simple.”
Sight is attempting to contact WordPress.
Challenges to the same-sex marriage postal survey are scheduled to be heard in the High Court, sitting in Melbourne, from Tuesday. Pending the outcome of the hearings, the surveys are slated to be mailed out next week.
Disclosure: The owner of Sight Magazine also runs another website on the WordPress platform.
