The headline of the story on FOX News is a doozy: “Gay Reversal Advocates Say School Libraries Banning Their ‘Ex-Gay’ Books.”
A Chicago-based group, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX), is suing the Montgomery County, MD school district for their purported “exclusion of “ex-gay” information in its sexual orientation health curriculum.“
PFOX (I am assuming no relation to FOX) says “there’s an entire community of people across the world who say that their sexual orientation changed from gay to straight. But they’re not getting their message out, the group says, because libraries across the country refuse to carry literature that describes these experiences or any studies that support them.“
In addition to Montgomery County, Maryland PFOX offered to donate a cache of “ex-gay” books to Arlington and Fairfax Counties in Virginia and they e-mailed all publicly funded universities nationwide that have a GLBTQ center.
The response was unified. On “our offer to donate ex-gay books and brochures, we were rejected by all,” says PFOX Executive Director Regina Griggs.
Their attempt to get the American Library Association (ALA) to make a statement during Banned Books Week also failed.
Why such resistance? Aren’t we all for a “Fair and Balanced” (pardon me for using the FOX News tagline) approach? Of course we are.
The problem is:
“All of the leading medical, therapeutic, psychiatric and social work organizations have a fair unanimity here about claims relating to the so-called ex-gay movement or so-called reparative therapy where the central idea is that these groups would like to try to change people’s sexual orientation or gender identity, and the consensus is that it’s unnecessary and damaging and can be severely harmful to people,” says Hayley Gorenberg, Lambda Legal Deputy Director.
So off to the court system they go and where we’ll end up nobody knows…
Here’s the FOX News slideshow of 5 of the books in question.