TAKE ACTION: How do you spell anti-gay bigot? N-C-F-R

Some things never change. I go off to Paris, and the National Council on Family Relations decides they can take the American taxpayers' dollars and use them to discriminate against gay families.

A few months ago we told you about how Michael Benjamin, the NCFR executive director, agreed to be the White House's front-man for "straights-only" marriage by assembling an online "National Healthy Marriage Clearinghouse." This website, scheduled to go live any day now, is supposed to be the most comprehensive source of information ever on how to have healthy marriages, oh but with one glaring bigoted exception: the inclusion on the Web site of any research on gay marriage or gay families is strictly forbidden by the feds who are financing the project. Forget that the marriage of gay couples is legal in Massachusetts.

What did NCFR do in response? NCFR agreed to this incredibly homophobic condition despite having very strict "governing principles" and "values" against anti-gay discrimination. Bit of a conflict there, you think? AMERICAblog readers responded with calls and emails, and dozens if not hundreds of individual NCFR members demanded the board of directors reconsider.

So we called off the dogs and let them reconsider. Turns out they were upset that we were so, umm, rude to them. Funny -- they decide to screw fair-minded Americans by sucking up to homophobic bigots and we're the bad guys. Uh huh.

Guess what? NCFR thought it was over, and now they've told us to get screwed.

In a memo to NCFR members, the board of directors justified its bigotry by, for example, claiming that since gay people can go to the new NCFR hetero-marriage-only Web site and see the same information straight people can see on the site, THEN THE SITE ISN'T DISCRIMINATORY. How's that for messed up?

(We'll be publishing the entire NCFR memo to members, with all its BS dissected, in the near future.)

Thanks a lot, NCFR. I get to learn how OTHER people can have healthy marriages, but I don't get to learn how I can as well, because apparently my settling down and having a healthy stable releationship is a sin, or un-American, or - oh, yeah, that's right - it might cost NCFR a buck to actually stand up for the principles it has written into its own non-discrimination policy. That's $5 million of your tax dollars at work, promoting discrimination.

NCFR lists contact information for their Executive Director and Board. Please contact them to let them know we haven't forgotten about them, and we don't appreciate them violating their own non-discrimination policies in order to make a fast buck from the federal trough.

Executive Director: Michael Benjamin mbenjamin@ncfr.org 763-231-2891
President: Gay Kitson kitson@uakron.edu 330-972-6863
President-elect: Pamela A. Monroe pmonroe@lsu.edu 225-578-3885
Martha Farrell Erickson mferick@umn.edu 612-825-9496
Lawrence H. Ganong ganongl@missouri.edu 573-882-6852
Deborah B. Gentry dgentry@ilstu.edu 309-438-8748
Robert Reyes rreyes@messiah.edu 717-766-2511 x7297
Jane B. Tornatore jbtornatore@comcast.net 206-706-7714
Marcie J. Brooke marcie.brooke@spps.org 651-293-5330
Julie K. Kohler kohler@knightfdn.org 305-908-2638