Family Foundation at UofR Tuesday, Students Meet Monday to Respond

GayRVA Staff
August 23, 2009

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Read More: Equality Virginia, Family Foundation, Jon Blair, U of R, University of Richmond, UofR

We just got this in from an administrator at UofR.

The Family Foundation will be holding a retreat on the campus of the University of Richmond on Tuesday, August 25 at the Jepson Alumni Center.  The Queer community at Richmond is holding a meeting at 5:00pm on Monday, August 24th in Tyler Haynes Commons Room 331 at 5:00pm to discuss a response to the Family Foundation’s presence on campus.

The Family Foundation supports an agenda banning many civil rights to GLBT people and has been building their campaign in Central Virginia according to an e-mail sent last week from Equality Virginia’s CEO Jon Blair.

Dear Friend,

I’ve had it!  I’m sick and tired of seeing the torrent of misinformation coming from the handful of radical insiders in Richmond who are trying to hijack our Commonwealth out from under us.

In an email alert this past June, the Family Foundation declared its biggest outreach mobilization effort since the Marriage Amendment.  Their campaign, which is now going to great lengths to force an extremist majority onto the House of Delegates, is once again centered on blocking fair-minded legislators while placing anti-GLBT and ideologically radical representatives into office.

They’ve mobilized their army of oppressors across the state to continue spreading a sweeping agenda of intolerance, bias, and outright hate – face to face with Virginians – by misleading the public about issues of equality and freedom.

It’s up to us to make sure that their propaganda machine of misinformation doesn’t drown out the voice of fairness among Virginia’s voters this year. Will you help support our efforts to counter them?

It’s plainly stated in their website and brochures.  If left unchecked, the Family Foundation plans to bully their way to the ultimate goal of:

• Banning Gay Straight Alliances in schools and other GLBT support groups.  It clearly doesn’t matter to the Family Foundation that GLBT teenagers are nearly 3 times more likely to commit suicide than other teenagers and that these support groups can mean the difference between life and death for kids who are struggling.

• Eliminating any and all policies recognizing GLBT families in Virginia. They’ve long been waging war on the partner benefits that private companies are pleading to offer and continue to bully legislators into blocking the state from offering these benefits to state workers.  They’d clearly prefer that GLBT couples have no relationship recognition whatsoever, regularly attempting to block even routine rights like hospital visitation.

• Denying LGBT parents rights while letting children sink into the swamp of the legal system. As we’ve seen so often over the years, the Family Foundation acts without regard to the emotional welfare and attachment that a child has for his or her parent, repeatedly advocating to legally separate GLBT parents from their children and working furiously to block loving GLBT parents from adopting children who desperately need a home.

• Defeating any candidate that expresses support of equality. They’ve already begun punching at statewide candidates simply for expressing the fact that they believe in fairness and aren’t swayed by the nastiness of extremist groups like the Family Foundation.

They’re using every tool in their arsenal to ensure a tyrannical future for all Virginians – twisting modern values to create outlandish misrepresentations of reality.  They’ve even gone so far as to claim they advocate on behalf of “diversity” in the family, when all they really mean is that they think having more than one gender in a marriage makes it diverse.

At the end of the day, their efforts really aren’t about maintaining a generally held consensus of what morality is – as they repeatedly like to claim.  It’s really about trying to radicalize the state and dictate their extreme view of ideological social order to the mainstream public by placing people far outside the mainstream into office.

It’s clear they’ve stepped up their efforts going into this fall and are elevating the stakes.  To counter them, we’re asking the fair-minded citizens of Virginia to respond.  Help us meet their increased efforts head to head and tell the public about the reality of equality and fairness!

Donate today to Equality Virginia’s work to educate Virginians about the need for a fair and inclusive Commonwealth.  Help us prevent the Family Foundation from distracting people from the truth.  And, when the Family Foundation inevitably responds to this email by saying that their handful of radical Richmond insiders actually represent the will of the over 7 million Virginians -- let them know what you think.

In Equality,

Jon Blair
CEO

Since concerns earlier in the year, the queer community at UofR has become more visible on campus.