Footage of gay rights demonstrations will not be removed from a Lincoln Memorial videotape, according to spokespeople from the National Park Service and the Human Rights Campaign. Earlier reports said the images would be removed.

Footage of gay rights demonstrations will not be removed from a videotape shown at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C, according to spokespeople from the National Park Service and the Human Rights Campaign. Earlier reports in various news outlets said the gay images would be removed.

In a press release yesterday, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a government-watchdog group, said that because of pressure from conservative groups, the National Park Service agreed to remove from the tape all scenes depicting gay and abortion rights rallies. "The Park Service leadership now caters exclusively to conservative Christian fundamentalist groups," PEER executive director Jeff Ruch said in the release.

But today that story has changed. "We have been assured that they are redoing the tape, but are not stripping out scenes of gay and lesbian events at the Lincoln Memorial, because to do so would be historically inaccurate," said Winne Stachelberg, political director at the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group. Stachelberg told the Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network that National Park Service Chief of Public Affairs, David Barna, made those reassurances to her this morning.

"It certainly sounds as if the park service is getting pressure from right-wing extremists groups to drop images of the gay community and add other images," Stachelberg added.

As part of its update, the National Park Service plans to add scenes including rallies by the Promise Keepers, a fundamentalist Christian men's group, and by pro-life groups to the video.

To do so, however, may not be historically accurate after all. Those rallies did not occur at the Lincoln Memorial or even on the nearby Mall, said Bill Line, a spokesperson for the National Park Service.

Line told the Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network that the pressure to replace gay and pro-choice images with Christian and pro-life scenes comes from conservative Kansas Republican congressman Todd Tiahrt.

In a letter to the National Park Service last February, Tiahrt objected to the portions of the video that depict gays and a National Abortion Rights League rally, Line said. Tiahrt is "in discussion" with the park service about adding the new scenes, Line said.

The 8-minute video, on public display since 1995, depicts images of a wide variety of events that took place at the Memorial, including black civil rights marches and anti-war demonstrations. The footage of gay rights lasts about 13 seconds, and the pro-choice footage lasts about 16 seconds, Line said.

Congressman Tiahrt's spokesperson was unavailable for comment, having left on a holiday vacation.

The changing video footage is part of a "very disturbing" series of events in which conservative Christians are influencing National Park service policy, said Ruch.

The National Park Service has been fighting a lengthy legal battle to continue to display an 8-foot cross in California's Mohave National Preserve, and has reinstalled plaques with Biblical verses along the rim of the Grand Canyon.

They have also endorsed the sale at Park Service bookstores of a creationist text, "The Grand Canyon: A Different View," which argues that, despite geological evidence to the contrary, the canyon was "created" several thousand years ago.

"The pattern is to accommodate Christian fundamentalist demands to display religious objects or remove historical objects they find offensive," Ruch said.

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