Concerned Women for America - Billboard About Ex-Gays Generates News, Hate Mail

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Billboard About Ex-Gays Generates News, Hate Mail 2/2/2005
By Robert Knight

Ad near school district offices in Maryland appears amid debate over sex ed curriculum.

The placement of a billboard in Rockville, Maryland, advocating that homosexuals can change has generated nationwide media interest as well as “lots of hate mail,” said Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), which placed the ad.

The billboard, which features a young man and the message “Ex-Gays prove that change is possible,” went up on January 7 in the suburb of Washington, D.C., and was to remain until early February. The Washington Times, The [Montgomery County, Maryland] Gazette and the Washington, D.C., network affiliates of Fox, CBS, NBC and ABC all did stories on it.

“I’ve been cussed out in every way possible from Colorado to San Diego,” Griggs said.

“Other affiliates must have picked this up, because we’re getting calls from all over the country saying they saw it on TV,” Griggs said. “We received e-mails from San Diego, Washington state, Colorado, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and the e-mails are still coming in,” Griggs said today.

The billboard is on a main boulevard, Hungerford Drive, two blocks away from the county school district offices and near Montgomery Community College, an above-ground subway track, and an Amtrak line. The location seems especially provocative given that the schools are enmeshed in controversy over a new sex education component that critics say promotes casual sex and homosexuality to middle school students. The Web site of one parents group, Citizens for Responsible Curriculum, says:

Teaching respect for persons with same-sex attraction is appropriate and right. But the new curriculum goes beyond the ethic of tolerance by demanding affirmation of a homosexual orientation and behavior, and in fact violates the value systems of many families. Therefore, the CRC recommends that it be rejected in favor of the current 8th grade and current high school curriculum.

Griggs said she had no idea the billboard would be placed in such a strategic location. “I think it’s safe to say all things happen with God’s timing, and His way, and thus the billboard appeared where it is.”

David Fishback, a lawyer who chairs the Montgomery County Public Schools Citizens Advisory Committee on Family Life and Human Development, which approved the new curriculum, has strongly criticized PFOX for the billboard, and the ex-homosexual movement in general.

Fishback responded to The Washington Times article, and to critics, on a Web blog, saying that the curriculum doesn’t promote homosexuality but merely tolerance. He also commented, “I do not think it is a terribly extraordinary proposition that there is nothing wrong with being gay.”

Fishback, who said he has two homosexual sons, according to The Washington Times, contends that it is “risky, risky business” for homosexuals to try to change their desires.

Warren Throckmorton, Ph.D., a Grove City College assistant professor in psychology, wrote a 32-page critique of the curriculum, concluding that it misrepresents science, excludes minority viewpoints and is designed to make children more accepting of homosexuality. Dr. Throckmorton’s essays frequently appear on Concerned Women for America’s (CWA’s) Web page.

Last June, the same PFOX billboard went up next to I-64 near Richmond. Within a few days, someone threw red paint on it. Similar versions of the ad were placed in Washington’s Metro subway system in 2003, and several were defaced.

“There's a complete intolerance on the other side,” Mignon Middleton, an ex-lesbian member of the Prince George's County chapter of PFOX, told the Gazette. “The billboard is up there and might have helped some people that need help. It's not showing hatred toward anybody.

“I see it as discrimination on the other end,” she said. “If someone said, ‘I have these feelings and I want to overcome it,’ to deny them that right to me that's discriminatory.”

Robert Knight, director of CWA’s Culture & Family Institute, is a board member of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays.