Anti-Abortion: Here's the Way to Start a Social Movement

 


When I was a Mayor, a prominent woman I knew, now deceased, wrote me a long letter complaining about my support for abortion rights. She lamented that she was not with the abortion protestors because she had always wanted to be in some great social movement. The opportunity had been there, she said, during the civil rights movement but she had not jumped in. What she did not understand is anti abortion does not have the noble characteristics of the civil rights movement. It does not have the characteristics of any successful social cause.

In the late 1960's, 49 states had statues outlawing sex between people of the same sex. Potential sentences ran to life in prison. Same sex attraction was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association. It was acceptable in major publications the use the term perversion and homosexuality interchangeably.

In 1972, gay leaders in New York City organized the annual gay rights parade. Among the gaudy and spectacular costumed gay men walked a mother, an elementary school teacher, and her young adult gay son. The son said his mother was remarkable in that when he reveal his same-sex attraction she did not react with alarm or dismay. She simply said the family should rally in his support for a happy and successful like. With the gay pride parade coming, she asked her son if she could walk with him. And, she said she wanted to carry some kind of sign with a message. 

Thus is was that Jeanne Manford carried a ragged piece of cardboard with the words, PARENTS OF GAYS: UNITE IN SUPPORT OF OUR CHILDREN. It was the first time anyone recalled of a public support by a parent of gay children. The only know reaction previously was silence and secrecy.

Manford and her son were swapped by people along the route in an emotional reaction. Gay people and other parents hugged her and wept. They wanting to know her name and could she come to their town. There was a news story about her. The momentum in 1972 carried forward for decades and continues to this day. She formed the group Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAGQ) which, this year, celebrates forty years. The organization is now world-wide. It has been perhaps the most influential of all gay advocacy groups in the world.

The organization stands for expanding rights and respect unlike anti-abortion and anti-gay which takes away of rights. That is the lesson of PFLAG.

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