Gay groups demanding an apology for 'attack'
Gay advocacy organizations are angry over "defamatory" remarks in a memo issued by a Juvenile Welfare Board member.
By ROBERT SAMUELS
Published March 7, 2005
ST. PETERSBURG - A member of the Pinellas County Juvenile Welfare Board has provoked the anger of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups for saying the groups endorse sex between underage youth and adults.
Cecilia Burke, who was appointed to the JWB's board of directors by Gov. Jeb Bush, made her statements in a memo Feb. 7 asking the board to sever ties with the support groups Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.
In a letter Friday, PFLAG alleged that Burke wrote "false" and "defamatory" comments about its organization and wants a public apology, said Ron Schlittler, the group's interim executive director. GLSEN and the National Center of Lesbian Rights co-signed the letter.
"Quite frankly, we are pleased to have this opportunity to clear our names," Schlittler said. "This is a national organization. Just as much as these comments were an attack on a local chapter, it is on our national reputation."
Burke's memo also said the groups support "unhealthy sexual practices among youth." She cited maintaining relationships with these groups as a reason to deny JWB's executive director Jim Mills a raise, a move which eventually failed.
Burke, who is married to the new Pinellas Clerk of Circuit Court Ken Burke, said contention within the JWB over how the taxpayer-funded agency should deal with sexual orientation issues started about two years ago, when one of its committees mailed bookmarks to high school principals that listed PFLAG and GLSEN as resources for gay students.
A neighbor complained to Burke that she didn't want her tax money spent on groups that didn't believe homosexuals could change their lifestyles, Burke said. So she began investigating the principles of the groups.
The Juvenile Welfare Board, which funds programs to help children, will receive about $42-million in property taxes this year, according to executive director Mills.
PFLAG and GLSEN say they provide support and counseling for those needing assistance to come to terms with sexual orientation issues. GLSEN, for example, coordinates and financially supports events for gay-straight alliances in schools, said Linda Lerner, president of the local GLSEN group and a Pinellas County School board member. PFLAG has monthly support groups and has protested laws that discriminate against gays.
For them, a relationship with the Juvenile Welfare Board - a youth referral service - seems natural.
Mills said he plans to continue JWB's relationship with the groups. Endorsing them is too strong a word, he said, but he "encourages using them."
Although JWB does not take a specific stance on homosexuality, it has a subcommittee that includes Lerner, that works with students and parents to create safe environments for "sexual minorities."
"I've worked with these organizations for years," Mills said. "I've never had any reason to believe they endorse pedophilia. I'm not sure where that came from."
Burke said she based some of her statements on the work of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuals.
Joseph Nicolosi, one of that group's psychotherapists, told the St. Petersburg Times that PFLAG was in fact a "very damaging group," but not one that officially encouraged pedophilia.
Burke's memo also criticized a mailing to school principals from a board committee saying that "reparative therapy" - a technique that tries to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality - is harmful for children with same-sex attractions and should be discouraged.
Schlittler of PFLAG called the practice, "a Christian-right type of junk science that was disproved years ago."
In 1997, health and medical organizations, including the American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association, issued a resolution against any methods to change homosexual desires, because homosexuality is not a mental illness. "What we've understood is that if a person tries this therapy and it doesn't work, there is a heightened sense of guilt and a lowered sense of self-esteem," said the APA's Clinton Anderson.
Politics, not science, has marred the debate over its benefits, Burke argues. But if a taxpayer wants to know about reparative therapy, she said, information should be readily available.
A document listing the benefits of reparative therapy is included in JWB's training manual as a matter of compromise, Mills said. That article is followed by research from JWB indicating that such counseling was at best questionable.
Word about the memo eventually reached PFLAG's national agency, which is when director Schlittler and PFLAG's attorneys got involved.
The letter demands Burke read a PFLAG-approved apology into the minutes of the next JWB meeting.
"We got our attorneys involved because these are scandalous remarks," Schlittler said. "And if we don't get what we want, we are prepared to take the fullest legal action possible."