An article in The Philadelphia Inquirer last weekend covered the first on-land trip for LGBT families sponsored by R Family Vacations.

Rosie’s group brings vacation to Philadelphia
By Melissa Dribben
Inquirer Staff Writer
March 11, 2007

This part surprised me:

Roberta Segal-Sklar, spokeswoman for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington, said this R Family initiative “carves out a space and time for our families to have our picnic.” Segal-Sklar and her partner of 28 years have two children, one in his late 20s, the other 16.

“There is so much inappropriate pontificating about whether gay and lesbian people should have children without regard for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of children who are living out their lives in our families.”

Note that it is the Director of Communications at the Task Force (”NGLTF”) who is quoted as saying that there are “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of kids with LGBT parents. According to one of NGLTF’s own publications, however, estimates range in the millions.

Estimates of the number of lesbian or gay parents in the U.S. range from two to eight million, making it difficult to accurately count the number of children who have one or more LGBT parents…Some estimates indicate that between six and 14 million children have at least one gay or lesbian parent.

(Source: “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Parents and Their Children,” NGLTF, 2004.)

On Monday, I alerted Executive Director Matt Foreman about this inaccurate statement attributed to the Task Force, asking that they respond by making a public statement to clarify the numbers. To the best of my knowledge, no such statement has been released by the Task Force.

Why do accurate statistics matter so much? Because anti-gay conservatives try to build their opposition by insisting that the “homosexual agenda” exaggerates how many queer individuals and queer families exist. I can think of several anti-gay researchers who, upon reading this uncontested statistic will be happy to reference it as “proof” for their case. (As in : “See, even a national pro-homosexual organization admits the commonly cited ‘millions’ is false.”)

Could Roberta Sklar have been misquoted? As of today, the reporter who filed the story says no one from the Task Force has contacted her for any reason in the four days since the article was published.

Like I said in my email to Matt Foreman: NGLTF is skilled at holding people accountable to correcting misrepresentations of the LGBT community. I don’t think this situation should be an exception to The Task Force’s vigilance.

Will the Task Force right this wrong?

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