Interview with Mitchell Gold

defending the First Amendment against the Christian right ...

... because if Jews don't speak out, they'll think we don't mind

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Interview with Mitchell Gold

Leader of the Faith in America campaign challenging religious bigotry against gays and lesbians talks with JewsOnFirst

by JewsOnFirst, July 27, 2006

"Religion-based bigotry. Let's end it now and forever," say ads running in Indiana and North Carolina. The ads are talking about bigotry against homosexuals. Mitchell Gold, who is leading the ad campaign through the Faith In America organization he founded, told JewsOnFirst that the ads will keep running until they work.

Gold is Jewish, spent his childhood in New Jersey. He told a packed town hall meeting in Indiana of his encounters with religious discrimination as a child, being excluded from one close friend's birthday party and a playmate's yard because he was a Jew.

"If facing bigotry because of his religion wasn't bad enough," says the Faith In America website's account of the speech, "Gold would discover as teen-ager that he was gay. He promised himself that he would kill himself by the time he reached 21 if he hadn't figured out how to change his sexual orientation. Fortunately, he moved to New York City, where a whole different perspective on life emerged for him in the comfort of meeting others just like him."

Gold and his partner now live in the Taylorsville-Hickory area of North Carolina where they run a successful furniture company -- and where Faith In America is running the ads you see pictured here in local newspapers. (To see the ads full size, please go to the Faith in America website, where they will open as PDF documents.)

The roll-out of the ad campaign in Indiana last month attracted national media attention and is set to continue past the month's duration initially set for it. Faith In America will continue concentrating on its ads in the Taylorsville-Hickory area. They are also set to launch in Colorado Springs, Colorado, headquarters of Focus on the Family.

"We want to make one place really work"
In an interview with JewsOnFirst, Gold explained the thinking behind the campaign. "We have limited funds so we are trying to focus on a few places to learn what messages are most effective," he said. "Our strategy is, rather than to expand, to just keep doing it and doing it and doing it in select locations."

He added: "We want to make one place really work so communities won't vote for candidates using coded language favoring discrimination against gays and lesbians. “

Taylorsville-Hickory was the logical choice for the campaign against bigotry, Gold said, because "we're the largest employer and the best employer" in the area. He said that the company, Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, pays competitive wages and has the best benefits in the area. "I’m told I bring a lot of credibility to the organizing," he said.

Before embarking on the campaign, Faith In America did some initial polling on what was effective. Now that the campaign is under way, Gold said "I can tell by the feel" what's working. He said people are stopping him to discuss the ads.

"The most exciting thing," he said, is when gay people who are religious tell him "'finally someone is saying something that I can say to my family and pastor.'"

Outreach to clergy
Reaching out to local clergy is an important part of the campaign. Before the ads started, Gold said, he wrote an open letter that he ran in the two area newspapers explaining what he was doing, telling pastors: "I don't want to debate scripture with you. I want to remind you that religion has been used in the past for discrimination and it's happening again."

Some ministers, however, were very upset by the campaign and ran their own negative ads about homosexuality, Gold said.

In his open letter, Gold encouraged correspondence from readers and, he said, “more than 25 people responded, by email and letter. Most of them were positive with less than five negative," Gold said.

In one response that he particularly liked the writer said "My minister says it's [homosexuality is] a sin, but I'm beginning to see it's not. It's the way you're born."

Another response came from a local Methodist minister, Gold said. "He wrote a beautiful note and invited me to come to services." Gold attended both the 8:45 and 11 AM services.

Gold said that he used to be "up tight" about engaging Christians in discussion. "I used to feel that I didn't have a right to confront Christians." But, said Gold, Rev. Jimmy Creech, the executive director of Faith In America, changed his mind about that. "He said 'you have every right to tell them that you think what they're doing is wrong. They don’t hesitate to tell you!'"

The Indiana campaign
The campaign in central Indiana was originally planned to last a month, but Gold said, "we're going to continue it." He said they were testing which ads are most effective.

The Jesus Metropolitan Community Church in Indianapolis is running the campaign on the ground, with hopes that other MCCs, which serve the LGBT community, will launch similar efforts. (The Faith In America website has some resources for getting started.)

The Indianapolis town hall meeting that kicked off the campaign was standing room only. Gold said his speech focused on the history of religious discrimination.

Faith In America's billboards and print ads for Indiana pose the challenge: "Would Jesus discriminate?"

According to an AP report about the Indiana campaign, the religious right American Family Association of Indiana distributed radio ads saying, "Not only did Jesus discriminate; he is going to discriminate again."

The AP followed that with a quote from Gold's town hall speech: "We can really be a guiding light in the world to what acceptance is really about."

To JewsOnFirst Gold said, "I'm really just tired of a terrible part of our history being repeated. Religion based discrimination really needs to end now.."

Campaign seeks a dialogue between gays, Christian conservatives

By Ken Kusmer, The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), July 14, 2006

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- "Would Jesus discriminate?"

The question has been popping up on billboards, yard signs and in newspaper ads around conservative central Indiana lately in a new, Bible-based appeal for acceptance of gays and lesbians. It's a campaign organized by a predominantly gay and lesbian denomination - Metropolitan Community Churches - and a Jewish gay activist.

Organizers say the effort is the first in a planned series of campaigns across the country aimed at getting people to take a fresh look at the social justice passages in the Bible. Continue