The formula is not so simple when advocating
for children (including pre-schoolers) who may be LGBTQ+. Parents
must advocate for their children, and, by necessity, must be the principal
advocates when their children are not prepared to take (and should not be
expected to take) the load of advocating for themselves. A
variation of this refrain was heard from many of the Parkland students
regarding gun policy after the mass murder at their school. As David Hogg said said, "Please.
We are children. You guys are, like, the adults. Take action, work
together, cover over your politics, and get something done." So parents are not simply allies; they must serve as principals, as well.
In a recent Facebook thread, Lee Blinder noted
that “there are LGBTQ+ adults here in the community, many like me who attended
MoCo schools.” Lee advised Board of Education Member Jill Ortman-Fouse,
that “for the best results . . . MCPS begin to seek guidance from those community
members, and allow our allies like David [Fishback] to support us in our
leadership on those endeavors. We have the connections and the knowledge to
know the needs of the community the best.”
Later in the thread, Lee wrote that “PFLAG
chapters in this area need to start to serve its function which is to educate
and support parents of LGBTQ+ better and to let LGBTQ+ persons ourselves lead
on policy. Outreach to unsupportive parents and helping parents
overcome barriers to supporting their youth, and for parents to have resiliency
and support in their advocacy for their youth is the work that PFLAG is
perfectly suited to do.”
I am Maryland Advocacy Chair for the Metro DC
Chapter of PFLAG (formerly known as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians
and Gays – we just use the acronym now because the scope of our concerns
reaches beyond sexual orientation and includes gender identity, as
well). I agree that members of the LGBTQ+ community should be deeply
involved in leadership on these issues, and not simply rely on their parents to
carry the ball. Indeed, I welcome such involvement. I certainly
fail to see how PFLAG is not "let[ting] LGBTQ+ persons ourselves lead
on policy." Over
the last 16 years, MCPS has listened to all who have useful ideas on how to
proceed, and never once has PFLAG gotten in anyone's way.
More to the point, who should be involved as “leadership”
is not a binary choice. This is not an either/or question. Supportive
parents know their children, and families know their needs, just as LGBTQ+
people have perspectives that should be listened to and appreciated. As a
straight cisgender man, I do not know everything there is to know about
LGBTQ+ children; but, similarly, as an LGBTQ+ person, Lee does not know
everything there is to know about my children. All of us
must be part of the mix.
I have been very pleased to see members of the
LGBTQ+ community in Montgomery County become more active in local
matters. Earlier this year, Mark Eckstein Bernardo, a gay man and
the father of two MCPS students, was, at my suggestion, named Vice Chair for
Maryland Advocacy for Metro DC PFLAG. (I have been working on LGBTQ+
issues in Montgomery County for 16 years, and, having reached three score and
ten, I know there must be a successor.)
PFLAG Community Groups
Lee states that “PFLAG chapters in this area
need to start to serve its function which is to educate and support parents of
LGBTQ+ better," including "helping
parents overcome barriers to supporting their youth, and for parents to have
resiliency and support in their advocacy for their youth." I
am compelled to note that this is, and has been for many years, precisely
the main focus of PFLAG. Metro DC PFLAG has 16 community groups in the
Washington DC metropolitan area, three of which are located in Montgomery
County, providing the assistance Lee recommends. The vast majority
of PFLAG volunteers do the work of the community groups. Indeed, my
introduction to PFLAG occurred when our younger son came out in 1997 and gave
my wife and me the contact information for the PFLAG community group at Cedar
Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda.
I suspect that Lee is not questioning the
efficacy of the community groups for those who attend them; indeed, I have no
idea what Lee's basis for such a criticism would be. Lee's real point
appears to be that PFLAG should do a better job reaching out "to unsupportive parents [which] is the work that PFLAG
is perfectly suited to do.” Reaching out to families who are
not supportive of their LGBTQ+ children has always been a challenge. We
in Metro DC PFLAG are here for them, but I do not know what we can do
specifically other than to urge schools and other social services organizations
to let students and their parents know that PFLAG community groups are
available to them. I do not know how we reach homophobic parents. We are happy
to work arm and arm with members of the LGBTQ+ community in Montgomery County
to find ways to reach out to those families and to continue to make progress in
MCPS. PFLAG and other groups have been able to do much to change the
culture so that more and more families are accepting of their LGBTQ+ children.
But I do not know what Metro DC PFLAG, a volunteer organization with virtually
no budget, can uniquely do to directly reach families who are so fearful and
misinformed about things they do not understand that they throw out their children.
I, for one, am certainly open to suggestions.
PFLAG ADVOCACY
On the advocacy front, where Lee seems to
believe that PFLAG should step back, some history is in order:
The advocacy role of Metro DC PFLAG,
particularly with regard to MCPS, came about because of the need to fill a
vacuum at the beginning of this century. At that time, there was
virtually no organized local effort to fix the antiquated MCPS health education
policies, which barred teachers from even mentioning LGBT matters. The parent
voice was pretty much silent when it came to school matters, and, with an
important exception noted below, virtually no other voices were being
raised.
The first significant step was the 2002
recommendation of the Board of Education’s Citizens Advisory Committee on
Family Life and Human Development (the “CAC”, then chaired by Larry Jacobs, a
gay man who was also an MCPS parent) to include discussion of sexual
orientation in the health education curriculum. When Larry retired
from the CAC at the end of that year, I was elected unanimously by the
CAC to be the next chair. As a PFLAG dad, a graduate of MCPS, and
the father of two gay MCPS graduates, I understood how important the parental
voice was in moving the ball forward. If parents did not stand up
for their children, who else would? There were gay members of the CAC,
and they contributed to the CAC discussions, but I was the one they chose to
take the lead.
Later, when a right-wing law suit threatened
to upend our progress, I became Advocacy Chair for the Metro DC PFLAG chapter,
and pressed MCPS and worked with the Board of Education to stay on track, and
we eventually secured a strong foundation for progress, including a secondary
school health education curriculum that accurately presents matters involving
sexual orientation and gender identity and a comprehensive set of policies
protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender
identity. See https://www.pflag.org/blog/curriculumvictorymontgomerycounty and http://davidfishback.blogspot.com/2017/03/recap-and-resources-sexual-orientation.html
PFLAG also confronted efforts by PFOX ("Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays," a right-wing front group) to
spread lies about so-called “conversion” or “reparative" therapies, when
PFOX annually distributed flyers in a number of MCPS high schools from
2006-10. MCPS believed it could not bar the flyers because of a
court decision finding that if flyer distribution was allowed, MCPS could not
discriminate based on “viewpoint.” Nor did the MCPS Administration, until 2012, take a position opposing the message of the flyers. Each time, when no one else took
an organized stand against the PFOX flyers, PFLAG distributed its own flyers in every high school explaining that all
mainstream American medical and mental health professional associations condemned
those practices as dangerous and ineffective. Finally, when PFOX distributed flyers in 2012, PFLAG not only distributed flyers again, but, as
Advocacy Chair, I successfully took on PFOX/Family Research Council spokesman
Peter Sprigg in a locally-televised
debate. The
resulting furor convinced the Board of Education to cancel the high school
flyer distribution program altogether. When no other organized group stood up to PFOX and
the Family Research Council, PFLAG did.
More recently, when transgender students and
their families had difficulty navigating MCPS, PFLAG worked with MCPS to get
stakeholder input to the MCPS policies on gender identity (virtually all of
which MCPS adopted) and then stepped up to urge MCPS to post its official policy on its
website, which it did in 2016. This was necessary, because not all MCPS school administrators
were aware of the policies. In the nearly two years since the website
posting, families have found it much easier to work with the
system.
In the last couple of years, two Montgomery County PFLAG moms,
including Stephanie Kreps (who is also founder of the Rainbow Youth Alliance), have been meeting with secondary school
GSAs, and have been instrumental in assuring that such clubs can be formed in
middle, as well as high schools. They and I have worked with families of
transgender students to inform them of their rights, and help them navigate the
increasingly friendly MCPS waters.
PFLAG has been well-positioned to advance the interests of
students. Any suggestion that our activity has somehow has
interfered with the ability of LGBTQ+ people to be prime advocates for LGBTQ+ interests
has no basis in fact. We need and want more people to pitch in. All
stakeholders need, in the now-immortal words of Lin Manuel Miranda in Hamilton,
to be “in the room when it happens.” (I should also note that a large
percentage of the Board of Directors of Metro DC PFLAG are LGBT, as is a large
portion of the National PFLAG staff, with whom we have closely worked.)
EMERGENCE OF LGBTQ+ ADVOCATES
So that is the history of the last 16 years. But just
because something worked well in one era, does not mean that it will be the
optimal approach in the future. It is important that LGBTQ+ students and
adults become part of the mix, as well. PFLAG should not have to stand alone as
the only organized group advocating for LGBTQ+ students at MCPS. It is
encouraging, for example, to see LGBTQ+ students, like Jamie Griffith, be advocates for themselves and their peers. And
Jamie is not the only one. One of the things we have been doing
behind the scenes is to help train students to be
self-advocates. Happily, more and more students are doing it on
their own, without PFLAG.
One of the most gratifying things to emerge from the campaign to
name the new Rockville elementary school after Bayard Rustin was the
effectiveness of members of the LGBTQ+ community, organized by Mark Eckstein
Bernardo, in explaining the wisdom of that name choice. Parents and
other allies of LGBTQ+ students weighed in heavily, but the testimony of LGBTQ+
students and LGBTQ+ MCPS graduates was the key. See, e.g., here and here. The
expanding circle of advocates on MCPS matters is a great thing for Montgomery
County.
It is also noteworthy that LGBTQ+ people in
Montgomery County are organizing around other important issues, notably the
problem of homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth, who have been thrown out of their
homes. Here, PFLAGers are best positioned to be allies, as we were in the
campaigns to secure Civil Marriage Equality and Anti-Discrimination Laws in
both Montgomery County and the State of Maryland.
***********
To summarize, Metro DC
PFLAG has played, and should continue to play, an important role in helping
MCPS become an increasingly welcoming and embracing place for LGBTQ+ students
and their families. We respect and applaud advocacy from others in the
LGBTQ+ community in Montgomery County, and look forward to working
together. All of us are principals in this effort. Together, we are stronger and more effective.
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