Long Island- Outraged by a recent Playboy.com nude pictorial featuring “The Women of Home Depot,” a group of about 20 local anti-pornography activists, clergy, conservatives and citizens gathered in the parking lot of the Farmingdale Home Depot yesterday morning to condemn what they called an endorsement of pornography on the part of the home improvement superstore chain.

“We are asking Home Depot to get out of the porn business,” said Robert Lloyd, executive director of Long Island Citizens for Community Values, a decade-old Huntington nonprofit whose slogan is: “Working to reduce the harmful effects of pornography.”

Invoking family values and quoting statistics on the role pornography plays in sex crimes, Lloyd and others called on Home Depot to restore its image by disavowing the Playboy.com pictorial. They threatened to boycott the Atlanta-based company, which has 20 stores in Nassau and Suffolk, unless it issued an apology and instituted changes to its employee policy to ensure it would not happen again.

Representatives from Home Depot and Playboy.com said Home Depot had nothing to do with the pictorial, a Web-only feature posted in July on Playboy.com’s pay section, which costs members $19.95 a month.

“We didn’t participate in this, we didn’t endorse it, we didn’t have anything to do with Playboy’s decision to do this,” Home Depot spokesman Don Harrison said, adding that this was the third time the company issued similar statements this year. “We couldn’t stop it. … Obviously they [the employees] didn’t do it on store time.”

Shoppers at the Farmingdale store seemed oblivious to the protest. “I think it’s fine,” said Lori Dolencie, 42, of Levittown, when asked about the nude photos. “More power to them.”

Previous pictorials featured female employees from Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Enron, said a Playboy.com spokeswoman. More than 400 women responded to the May casting call for “Hardware Hotties.” None of the six chosen to pose in various states of undress – some leaning up against ladders, others in orange aprons – were from Long Island, she said.

An unidentified employee from the Farmingdale store is among the more than 100 would-be models whose submission photographs are also available. A Playboy.com spokeswoman would not name the woman.

“Nobody was fired from Home Depot for appearing in this pictorial,” Harrison said.

Shouldering a roll of synthetic turf, shopper Bruce Reinhart, 57, of Baldwin, said he couldn’t care less about the photos. “There’s enough other problems in the world.”