A Tory councillor who said she didn’t want “Pride sex flags” along her local high street and that “sex is for the bedroom and private life” has been suspended by the Conservative party.

On Saturday, Angela Kilmartin, an 81-year-old Conservative councillor in Essex, southeast England, was told by the Witham Conservative Association that she had been suspended over posts she wrote on social media criticising Pride flags.

Kilmartin had written in reply to a Facebook comment: “I don’t want pride sex flags along my High Street. I don’t even want heterosexual flags along my High Street.”

“Sex is for the bedroom and private life, not for displaying preferences in public,” she added.

Witham Town Council, of which Kilmartin is also a member, appointed an LGBTQ+ ambassador in June 2020 and a rainbow flag is flown from the town hall during Pride month.

Kilmartin defended her comments and told The Epoch Times that she had received “an overwhelming response from the silent majority.”

“All I know is myself and hundreds of thousands of people have been supportive of my views in the media,” she said.

Kilmartin, who has been a councillor for 16 years and has also been the mayor and chairman of the district council, said she had been suspended by Witham Conservatives for a period of 21 days while they investigated her.

“I am besieged by people saying that I had every right to say something,” she added.

“I have never seen anything like this and I just keep repeating what they are all saying, ‘It’s the silent majority, we are behind you, please stick up for us,'” she added.

Also known as the gay pride flag or simply pride flag, the rainbow flag is a symbol of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) pride and LGBT+ social movements.

Free speech activists have expressed concern that many institutions of power fly its flag and that as a political movement it is becoming unquestionable.

One critic told The Epoch Times that such symbols represent a “quasi-state official ideology.”

In July 2022, Hampshire Police visited the home of Darren Brady, an army veteran they accused of causing “anxiety” by sharing a meme of the “Progress Pride” flag rearranged as a swastika on Twitter as a joke.

In 2021, the BBC reported that Bockbrook and Borrowash Parish Council in Derbyshire faced backlash for opting to display a Pride flag for one day in September instead of for a whole month. The year before, the council did not fly the flag at all, saying it could give “the appearance that one part of our community is being made more special than all the others.”

The Epoch Times understands there are two investigations into Kilmartin underway.

A Braintree District Council spokeswoman told The Epoch Times by email: “We are disappointed to hear of this post as Braintree District Council have policies to promote equal and fair treatment for all.

“The council celebrates and supports the diversity of the district and we recognise this within our own organisation and in everything we do. We expect our councillors and staff to do the same,” she said.

The spokeswoman said that there are “a number of separate code of conduct issues that we’re also looking into and working on.”

“Further, we are aware that Councillor Kilmartin has been suspended from the Conservative Group pending their own investigation into the matter,” she added.

The Epoch Times contacted Witham Conservatives for comment.

Marc Glendening, head of cultural affairs at the free-market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs, told The Epoch Times by email that Kilmartin “is absolutely right from a liberal-democratic perspective” to oppose the flying of the LGBT+ flag.

“Public bodies should not be seeking to use facilities that all taxpayers contribute to in order to push any political or cultural or partisan position. Thus, they should not, as she says, be pushing pro-heterosexual as well as gay, or any other kind of sexuality,” he said.

Glendening said that the LGBT+ flag is “profoundly political in that it is an assertion of transgender ideology, as well as Black Lives Matter.”

“Symbols representing these movements have been crafted onto the old gay and lesbian rainbow flag. Both of these movements seek political changes,” he added.

Glendening said that in flying this flag, such councils are “explicitly supporting the anti-liberal agenda linked to them.”

“The decision by state institutions to fly this contentious flag is an indication of the way in which the political neutrality that a liberal democracy depends on is becoming eroded.

“A quasi-state official ideology is incrementally now emerging and being imposed,” he added.