Lesbian Couple Refuses to Leave Until Dobson Takes Steps Toward Reconciliation With LGBT Community
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SOULFORCE MEDIA ADVISORY: February 19, 2007
For Immediate Release
Contact: Paige Schilt, Media Director
Cell: 512-659-1771
paige@soulforce.org
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(Colorado Springs, CO) — Soulforce, a national civil rights and social justice organization, has launched an ongoing campaign called "Focus on the Facts," which aims to intervene in James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s representations of lesbian and gay families through an ongoing campaign of civil disobedience modeled on Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent social change.
| What: | Lesbian couple enters Focus on the Family headquarters to engage in dialogue and civil resistance: they seek an end to anti-gay propaganda. |
| When: | Monday, February 19, 2007 at 11:00 a.m. MST |
| Where: | Focus on the Family, 8605 Explorer Dr., Colorado Springs, CO |
At approximately 11:00 a.m., Dotti Berry and Robynne Sapp of Blaine, Wash., entered Focus on the Family headquarters to join a regularly scheduled tour. Once inside, the two women will attempt to speak with visitors and staff about the organization’s defamation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans. They will not leave voluntarily until Focus on the Family (FotF) and James Dobson promise to cease their misleading statements about research on lesbian and gay parents. Arrests are possible.
Berry and Sapp, who have entered FotF twice before, are the first participants in the "Focus on the Facts" campaign.
Dobson and his staff at FotF have consistently misrepresented LGBT families as dangerous and undeserving of equal protection under the law. These dehumanizing portrayals are often bolstered by misleading references to social science research. In December 2006, two prominent researchers–Dr. Carol Gilligan and Dr. Kyle Pruett–publicly rebuked Dobson for mischaracterizing their research in his TIME Magazine editorial about Mary Cheney’s pregnancy.
For more information about James Dobson’s misrepresentation of social science research, visit: www.soulforce.org/article/899.
Focus on the Facts is a project of Soulforce, a national civil rights and social justice organization. Our vision is freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from religious and political oppression through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance. For more information go to www.soulforce.org.