Metro DC Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and the Rainbow Youth Alliance (RYA) sent the following letter this week to the Montgomery County Public Schools’ Board of Education.
The school district — located in an otherwise liberal area of Maryland adjoining Washington, D.C. — falsely claims to be required by court rulings to host the antigay fliers of an organization whose leaders call for the imprisonment of all LGBT people, including parents and students. (TWO encourages the SPLC to take note.)
Visit Teach The Facts for complete local background, or check out Truth Wins Out’s articles about PFOX efforts to undermine public education in Maryland.
When Family Research Council spokesman Peter Sprigg told MSNBC on Tuesday that LGBT people should be thrown in prison for their alleged private behavior, it escaped the attention of the news media that Sprigg is also a board member and spokesman for an FRC offshoot called Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays, which distributes antigay propaganda in public schools.
Sprigg is also one of the few local citizens to serve on a citizens’ advisory board for Montgomery County Public Schools in Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs.
Just two days after Sprigg proudly declared that LGBT people of all ages should be imprisoned, the school district sent students home with PFOX brochures. The brochures tell students that if they are same-sex attracted, it is OK to be of two minds, to conceal one’s attractions from friends and family, to be dishonest, and proclaim one’s so-called heterosexuality. And while PFOX opposes any right to self-determination for persons who wish to be honest about their orientation, it doesn’t acknowledge this in the brochures; instead, PFOX portrays students who seek to be sexually honest and free from bullying as if they are oppressing those students wish to hide in shame and to bully or imprison others.
Neither the literature nor the school district tell students any of the following truths: (Read More)
Antigay activist Ruth Jacobs is a veritable pornographer for Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and for Christian-Right outfits in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Her testimonies against comprehensive sex education and transgender access to public facilities routinely consist of graphic and one-sided descriptions of sex acts. Her kinky speeches are purposely entered into the public record in order to fill the minds of taxpayers, library visitors, churchgoers, and elected officials with dirty thoughts and sex-starved antigay fantasies instead of uplifting public dialogue about public health, human dignity, freedom, and lifelong love between two people. Jacobs also refers to the supposed rights of unnamed, absent, and frankly non-existent “ex-transgender” and “ex-gay” people to be free from the existence of the real gay and transgender people who testify.
See for yourself — but don’t watch this from your workplace:
The Genocide for Jesus blog has helpfully transcribed her entire appearance at a District of Columbia hearing on marriage for the District’s gay couples.
Of particular note, according to the blog:
During a questioning period, she admitted to Council chair Phil Mendelson that she had no evidence of her claims of a connection between same-sex marriage and HIV infection. Councilman David Catania asked her what gay male sex had to do with lesbians and marriage, especially since lesbians have the lowest rate of HIV infection. Jacobs became flustered and said she wasn’t there to talk about that fact.
re-legalize discrimination against transgender persons
deny transgender persons access to gender-specific public facilities
The coalition includes “Citizens for Responsible Government” — an outfit of seemingly paranoid individuals sponsored by the national pro-theocracy Family Research Council and Alliance Defense Fund — and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX).
The Maryland Court of Appeals today threw out a ballot petition to re-legalize discrimination against the transgender residents of Montgomery County. The antigay group, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum and its offshoot Citizens for a Responsible Government, obtained substantial publicity and petition support from Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and its co-founder, the Family Research Council. The antigay campaign suffered from reports of misconduct among uncivil and misinformed canvassers who deceived petition signers about the petition. (Read More)
The parents of PFOX wrote to me yesterday to alert me to the “Political and Social Oppression of the Ex-Gay Community.” How horrible, I thought, that the sprawling Ex-Gay Community is treated that way!
I feared for the lives and the rights of my “no – longer – identified – as – anything, free-from-freedom, no – news – here, move – along” friends in the teeming ex-gay ghettoes of Colorado Springs and Orlando. So I tore open the PFOX e-mail envelope and read the following dispatch from suburban Washington, D.C. …
As you can see from the below local ABC news video, many ex-gays are afraid to come out of the closet because of the harassment they will receive — their names, phone numbers and personal information posted on gay websites; attacked at ex-gay exhibit booths; press releases issued against them, etc. The tactics of gay activists are to go after anyone who comes out publicly as ex-gay, force them back into the closet, and then claim that ex-gays don’t exist because there aren’t any out in public:
PFOX radiates fear and paranoia — blaming critics of the ex-gay industry for ex-gay homophobia, prejudice, and fear of legitimate mental-health professionals. These fears result in ex-gays, and the antigay families of gay people, living in fear of their own shadows.
Thankfully, open-minded parents and school officials in Maryland were also watching WJLA-TV on May 5.
David Fishback, for example, is a former chair of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools Citizens Advisory Committee for Family Health and Human Development. He also is on the board of Metro-DC PFLAG.
The full text of WJLA’s video report is here; Fishback’s full analysis is here. (Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, is featured in the WJLA report.)
Here are some brief bullet points that I culled from Fishback’s analysis: (Read More)
The Maryland pro-tolerance parent-faculty group Teach The Facts launches a thoughtful discussion of research into sexual fluidity among some women.
Various researchers, among them Dr. Lisa Diamond in Sexual Fluidity – Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, have asserted that sexual orientation in some women naturally drifts in both directions: from heterosexual to homosexual or vice versa. In other words, some women are naturally attracted to attributes other than a given person’s gender characteristics. Such fluidity appears to be extremely uncommon among men.
The TTF blog compares intelligent analysis of sexual fluidity and bisexuality with the ideological rigidity and deception of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays, an advocacy group which baselessly asserts that same-gender attraction is rooted in bad parenting or abuse rather than natural impulses; that all people can change; that change occurs by choice, not nature; and that change only occurs one way — from homosexual to heterosexual.
Teach The Facts, a group of Montgomery County, Maryland, parents and educators, offers a run-down on PFOX ex-gay literature that was distributed last week to local high-school students. TTF’s main points:
The PFOX literature falsely claims that PFOX promotes tolerance, but PFOX’s web site is loaded with literature opposing tolerance.
The PFOX literature illogically asserts that ex-gay self-denial, self-deception, and failure serve as proof that GLBT youth can and should seek help from unlicensed ex-gay therapists and political groups.
The PFOX literature falsely insinuates that ex-gay activists who seek to silence and suppress gay students support self-determination, while advocates for academic freedom, tolerance, learning, and nonviolence oppose self-determination and happiness.
Police continue to investigate multiple death threats against Montgomery County, Maryland, council member Duchy Trachtenberg.
Trachtenberg has been threatened because of her support of a bill opposing discrimination against transgender county residents. Letters to her have allegedly varied in tone, from outright threats to profane language to haughty messages parroting ex-gay and antigay memes unrelated to transgender issues.
One of those letter-writers is Sharon Kass of Silver Spring, Md., an increasingly prolific enemy of civility in public discourse about gay and transgender equality. (Read More)
Concerned Women for America and “Citizens for Responsible Government,” a Maryland antigay group connected with PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays), have been battling a suburban Washington, D.C., ordinance that aims to reduce discrimination by public facilities against gender-variant and intersexed individuals.
In an interview with CWFA, a representative for the Maryland group admits faking an incident at a public restroom in order to incite public opposition to nondiscrimination.
MARTHA KLEDER [of CWFA]: Well Theresa, I also heard that someone tried to test this. Was there some event where a transgender or a shemale or someone tried to use the opposite sex bathroom?
THERESA RICKMAN: Yes, at Rio Sport and Health up in Germantown. A guy dressed as a girl went into the ladies bathroom. And, ah you know, essentially what uh, that was meant to get some media attention, you know, and the guy left immediately apparently, I mean but there was, this is the Rio Sport and Health Club, you know and Sport and Health has steam rooms, and there are ladies changing in those locker rooms, people in various stages of undress [laughing] all the time, so there’s lots a guy can see.
According to Teach The Facts, a Maryland group of pro-tolerance parents and teachers, Washington-based ABC affiliate WJLA-TV recklessly reported the staged incident as if it were real, and has yet to retract its false reporting.
Sprigg is also one of the few local citizens to serve on a citizens’ advisory board for Montgomery County Public Schools in Washington, D.C.’s Maryland suburbs.
