Borderline hate group PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays) has been distributing their filthy materials in a Maryland high school, Fox DC reports.
Parents unfamiliar with the organization’s twisted message had their eyes opened when their kids brought the flyer home. Social worker Karen Yount-Merrell essentially said WTF when her son brought home a PFOX flyer alongside his report card from Einstein High School.
“I don’t like it,” Yount-Merrell said to Fox. “Everything in this flyer make its sound like the goal is to be [an] EX-gay, [or an EX]-lesbian. It is not embracing of a different orientation. It reiterates a societal view that there’s something ‘wrong’ with you, if you’re not in the norm. If you aren’t heterosexual. And teenagers have a hard enough time dealing with who they are and feeling good about themselves.”
“If people were to actually read the content of the flyer that we’re distributing, they will see there is nothing in here that is insulting or even critical of homosexuals,” said PFOX board member Peter Sprigg. “All it is telling kids [is] that you don’t have to be gay if you don’t want to be.”
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Right, kids. You can just be bisexual first and then choose to be gay or straight, like Cynthia Nixon!
Here’s the whole flyer:
christopher di spirito
“Taking advantage of a recent court decision…”
Yeah, lets protect the bigots and haters. What’s next in Montgomery County, MD? Allowing the KKK to hand out literature at the YMCA?
KyleW
What a pity that this group and their web site, which purports to be about support for gays, is primarily geared towards convincing them that they can change if they want to. That’s not support – that’s misleading, and yet again it places homosexuality as something that kids should flee from.
In their “Feelings change” pamphlet they say “Sexual orientation is a matter of affirmation and public declaration”.
whilst their “Gender identity confusion” pamphlet repeatedly describes transgeder as a “disorder” and summarises it as “people seeking to change their appearance to the opposite of their birth gender”.
This group is dangerous and should be shut down immediately.
Phantom
@KyleW: Agreed with you.
matt
I love how Peter Sprigg, the obsessive anti-gay activist who has literally advocated for criminalizing homosexuality, is trying to defend his organization as not being anti-gay. I’m pretty sure PFOX used to just be “parents and friends of exgays” not “parents and friends of exgays and gays” also. It’s pretty obvious what’s going on here, they’re trying to pass themselves off as a friendly informative organization so they can trick gay kids into coming in to be brainwashed by their ridiculous right-wing lies.
Chad
Maybe PFOX should mention in their article that, Alan Chambers the Ex-gay leader of Exodus, recently admitted that the majority of the people they offer help to never actually change their orientation.
Shannon1981
They are keeping it just neutral enough to not be a registered hate group and banned from campuses. However, I am linking this article and their website to splc.
Thanks for the tip, this needs to be nipped.
Danny
You have to remember that many of the rightwing religious groups literally think gay people should be executed to appease their desert god’s genocidal wishes. These kind of people are insane and dangerous to children.
David Fishback
Sent today to the writer of the Fox News 5 piece:
Dear Mr. Henrehan,
A minister in Gaithersburg just passed along to me your report on the PFOX flyers, and expressing great dismay that the PFOX message would be passed along to students.
http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/maryland/school-defends-friends-of-ex-gays-flyer-handed-out-to-students-020212
In your report, you quote Family Research Council and PFOX board member Peter Sprigg, who characterized the PFOX flyer as benign. It is clear that the flyer seeks to use benign language, but, of course, it refers people to the PFOX website. It only takes a click or two to reach this item, stating that “Sexual orientation therapy has proven effective for those with unwanted homosexual attractions.” http://pfox.org/Facts_on_full_sheet_Apr_1.pdf It is this message that is so objectionable.
These sorts of therapies have been condemned as dangerous by every mainstream American medical and mental health professional association, including the American Medical Association, which explicitly opposes “therapies” based on the incorrect premise that gay people are ill or that they should change their sexual orientation. See AMA Policy Number H-160.991 Health Care Needs of the Homosexual Population, found at http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/about-ama/our-people/member-groups-sections/glbt-advisory-committee/ama-policy-regarding-sexual-orientation.page See also the American Psychological Assn.’s Just the Facts About Sexual Orientation and Youth: A Primer for Principals, Educators, and School Personnel, a publication expressly developed for school personnel and endorsed by 13 other organizations, which notes that “the nation’s leading professional medical, health, and mental health organizations do not support efforts to change young people’s sexual orientation through therapy and have raised serious concerns about the potential harm from such efforts.” http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/just-the-facts.pdf
Any discussion of PFOX should include what has been its prime focus from its inception: Convincing gay people that they can change their sexual orientation. This message is dangerous and destructive to health. Moroever, suggesting that gay people can choose to be straight contributes to atmospheres that can be conducive the bullying.
Attached, for you information, is the flyer that PFLAG distributed at MCPS high schools in 2010.
Please let me know if I may be of any assistance. on this issue.
David Fishback, Advocacy Chair
Metro DC Chapter of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)
Okama
Good article, but what’s with the swipe at bisexuals? Just because Cynthia Nixon has a weird way of describing her own orientation (though I must say that that is how many bisexuals including me would describe ourselves, albeit usually *only* to ourselves) doesn’t mean the rest of us are all just making it up.
KyleW
@David Fishback: Nice Job David, but sadly I feelit will be completely ineffective because Fox is not interested in truth, only sensationalism and a mainstream agenda.
Scott Rose
To:
Montgomery County Schools Board President Brandman:
I have several questions for you regarding your school district’s authorization for the distribution of PFOX flyers.
PFOX is a religious organization, which has to some extent learned to hide and/or camouflage its religious motivations and intentions.
Despite PFOX’s camouflaging of its religious motivations, when you promote the group through a public school, you are violating the constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state.
This is particularly alarming to me as a contributor to The Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
The PFOX website has a “Daily Prayer,” for your reference it is at this link: (http://pfox.org/daily_prayer.html) Here is how the PFOX Daily Prayer begins:
“Father, in the Precious Name of Your Son Jesus, I come, first of all with a heart of thanksgiving, for the sacrifices you made at Calvary for us all. It is because of your living, your suffering, your dying and your resurrection that we are able to claim redemption today. Father, I want to thank you for the awesome change you have wrought in MY life. How you allowed me to survive while I was trapped under the deception of homosexuality, that it even resembled ‘life’. Lord, thank you for how you protected me all those years, for how you provided for me and healed my body even though I was so lost. Thank you, Lord, for how you loved me anyway and how you NEVER let me out of your site. And most of all, Lord, I thank you for how you spoke to my heart one Tuesday morning and called me to come out from among them, to begin this joyous journey of your tremendous salvation. Thank you Jesus! Thank you for your gifts and for this ministry to teach and to love those who, like I once did, walk outside of your will with regard to homosexuality. Thank you for choosing me to share the truth of your rewards of eternal life through your son, Jesus, but also to warn about the consequences of rejecting the truth of your Word and your divine order.”
I believe that just the beginning of the PFOX Daily Prayer speaks for itself and that you understand why I assert that by allowing the group to distribute materials through your public schools, you are violating the separation of church and state.
PFOX Board Member Peter Sprigg has been giving disingenuous interviews to the media in which he says that if people will just look at the content of the PFOX “they will see there is nothing in here that is insulting or even critical of homosexuals.”
For you to understand Sprigg’s theocratically-motivated duplicity in that statement, you have to know that he has said on radio broadcasts that “every human being is born in the image of God, and to be born in the image of God is a far higher and better thing than for anyone to be born gay.”
You can hear PFOX’s Sprigg saying that, and more, at this link, where he is talking with the notorious anti-Semite, racist, anti-gay bigot Bryan Fischer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1LcsCmfmFI
Now, here is what I want to know from you:
1) Do you acknowledge that PFOX has right-wing Christian-specific, theocratic motivations?
2) Do you acknowledge that PFOX is an organization that seeks to proselytize?
3) Do you acknowledge that PFOX’s proselytizing goes beyond boundaries of . . for example . . trying to convince Jews that they will go to hell if they don’t accept Jesus . . to trying to convince gay people that they will go to hell if they don’t accept Jesus and repress their homosexuality?
4) Do you acknowledge that in allowing PFOX to distribute its flyers, you have violated the constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state?
Please respond by 5p.m., Tuesday, February 7. Please be advised that I will be in communication with federal authorities about this matter.
Scott Rose
Shannon1981
@Scott Rose: I would love it if you could alert me to the proper federal authorities about this matter as well.
I have every intention of telling them what these people are and what they promote, and pointing out that it is illegal for them to proselytize in a public high school.
B
Obviously they need to substantially improve the success rate of their “therapies”. Probably the only way to do it is to cheat – to get a bunch of straight guys to try gay sex so they can be cured of it. PFOX needs a massive increase in the number of people outing themselves in schools so they will have a lot of “straight but ostensibly confused” people to “cure” of being “gay”.
Their statement that nobody has found a “gay gene” is misleading – it takes a lot of work to determine which genes are responsible for a trait, and there aren’t enough people out there working on it to give you an instantaneous answer.
Gary
@Scott Rose: MCPS doesn’t care about anything but maintaining its own reputation, in a cloak of secrecy, and no doubt will sweep this under the rug, claiming that they knew nothing about it. MCPS’s administration is not made up of the most intellectual bunch of people. When I routinely asked them about support for LGBT parents, all their diversity office could respond with was their allowance and tolerance of gay-straight alliances. They bend over backwards on behalf of students of color and parents of color, but proactively do nothing for LGBT students or LGBT parents (or disabled students or parents).
Shannon1981
Join this group! This is my friend Ronnelle’s answer to PFOX!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/385208028161075/