Joint Statement of Support for Robert Oscar Lopez and Academic FreedomCall to Investigate California State University, Northridge

[Names Changed to Protect Privacy]

To: Chancellor Timothy White

CC: See distribution list attached

Date: August 12, 2015

Re: Academic Freedom at California State UniversityImportance of Scholarly Integrity for Children of Gay Couples

Encl: Eight Individual Statements from Daughters of LGBT ParentsDistribution List for CCs/PDF Articles

Dear Chancellor White,

As daughters of gay parents, we are writing to request that you uphold the highest standards of academic freedom, unbiased research, and free interdisciplinary inquiry. We ask that you do so especially in areas in which there is great political pressure arrayed against those who present unpopular viewpoints. The dominant depictions of same-sex parenting—from recent New York Times coverage, to studies which employ small convenience samples, to prime-time sitcoms—often present a one-sided and inaccurate depiction of the children of gay couples. In terms of reporting, writers often refer to a supposed "consensus" among researchers that all children of gay parents report just as much satisfaction as children in homes with a mother and father. 

These incomplete representations of children of gay couples impose an unfair silence on such children. So isolating is the pervasive message that children with LGBT parents fare “just as well” as their counterparts raised in married mother/father households, that each signatory of this letter at one point felt “I must be the only one” who disagrees with the supposed same-sex parenting “consensus.” One cannot downplay the role of free exchange of ideas and writings in our ability to “come out” and speak up, despite our perspective being largely excluded from the national discussion.

University research has also played a crucial role in public discussions of gay parenting. And in the future, we hope that the role of scholarly and interdisciplinary work will increase. Ongoing research in this field is critical for the health and well-being of children, and professors must be free to examine, critique, and study household structures without fear of losing their academic standing. However, there are very few in academia who can personally understand this issue from a child’s perspective. In fact, the only tenured professor sympathetic to our point of view who is also a child of a gay home is Robert Oscar Lopez, who happens to hold a position at Cal State Northridge.

Dr. Lopez has drawn from resources available to him due to his tenured position and has initiated new interdisciplinary approaches to gay parenting research. He

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has developed humanities-based approaches to offset the earlier over-reliance on quantitative social-science research. As a professor with a history of growing up with “two moms,” personal experience as an LGBT father raising two children with their mother, and a doctorate, he plays an integral role in advancing the study of gay parenting toward greater breadth and objectivity.

Like almost all children of gay couples who have come forward as adults with mixed reviews of their childhoods, Dr. Lopez has been brutally attacked and blacklisted by advocates of the fertility and adoption industries, which plan to profit handsomely from same-sex parenting. In Dr. Lopez's case, public campaigns to defame him crossed the line into tampering with academic research.

Under threat of backlash from LGBT activists in France, Dr. Lopez was prevented from delivering a lecture at Lille University on March 21-22, 2013, though his paper had been accepted in 2011. 

Jeremy Hooper, a blogger at Good as You, coordinated efforts with Stanford students in a failed attempt to stop Lopez from presenting in Palo Alto in April 5, 2014. See: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/suppressing_the_black_diaspora_at_stanford.html. One year later, graduate student Jeff Cohen would misquote Lopez’s presentation as part of a successful campaign to bar Jennifer Lahl, a close associate of Dr. Lopez’s, from delivering a lecture at the Stanford Medical School. See: http://www.stanfordanscombe.org/april-1-2015.html.

The Human Rights Campaign sent a defamatory letter about Dr. Lopez to over a million recipients in October 2014, days after Dr. Lopez organized a research conference at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. This letter from the HRC prompted dozens of people to forward denunciatory messages about him to colleagues and administrators at CSU-Northridge. See: http://thefederalist.com/2014/10/27/what-its-like-to-face-the-lgbt-inquisition/.

The GLAAD blacklist page with misleading quotations attributed to Dr. Lopez was brandished by a Catholic University undergraduate, who orchestrated a group of hecklers and tried to stop him from presenting work for International Children's Day in November 2014. See: http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/25/when-the-queer-stepfords-come-to-catholic-u/.

On October 27, 2014, a lesbian and apparently former assistant professor, residing in Ventura County, filed a request for a restraining order against someone named “Jarvis.” The petitioner, Ernestina Walpole, claimed that the accused was engaging in “civil harassment” by discussing Dr. Lopez’s work and the work of Rivka Edelman (Lopez’s co-editor), and needed to be restrained from posting any of Dr. Lopez’s essays on Facebook. See: http://www.ventura.courts.ca.gov/via/ CaseInformationSummary.aspx?CaseNo=56-2014-00459418-CU-HR-VTA. In November, Jarvis contacted Dr. Lopez to let him know that there appeared to be parties in southern California attempting to set a precedent classifying his publications on

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same-sex parenting as illegal harassment. Ventura Superior Court Judge Michele Castillo dismissed this case on December 10, 2014, but Dr. Lopez had to spend a month and a half not knowing if his entire archive of published works was going to be categorized as criminal hate speech.

As recently as May 2015, officials at UCLA attempted to cancel his lecture, "How Kids of Gays Speak Out, and How Society Responds," sponsored by UCLA's Anscombe Society. The president of the organization was apparently called in by an administrator and pressured to cancel the event based on claims that Lopez had a “history of making radical statements.”

Dr. Lopez has been branded "anti-gay," "ex-gay," and "an exporter of hate" due to his efforts to critique the exploitative impacts of third-party reproduction and to remind readers of the lessons learned from critical race theory. Like so many people of color, children of gay couples experience unique pains and strains because they are treated, too often, as objects to suit adult needs rather than as subjects with their own autonomous thoughts and feelings.

As troubling as the above facts may appear, even worse is the persistent and severe harassment that Dr. Lopez has endured at CSU N0rthridge by his own colleagues and supervisors. In fact, there appears to be such deep political hostility to Dr. Lopez that his department and college have shown their willingness to harm their own institutional goals as collateral damage in order to punish and censor him. If we use the 2013 Handbook of Accreditation Revised, published by the WASC Senior Colleges and Universities Commission (http://www.wascsenior.org), revised in April 2015, we find that Northridge routinely and severely violates accreditation standards for California colleges.

Standard 1.1 outlined by WASC (pg. 12) echoes the longstanding position of the American Association of University Professors (see 1940 statement on academic freedom), in providing that California colleges must respect a mission that “contributes to the public good,” not the advancement of one institution, one individual, one coterie, or one political camp. Standard 1.3 places “commitment to academic freedom” at the forefront of institutional standards as well (pg. 12).

Standard 2.8 emphasizes that institutions must value and promote “scholarship, creative activity, and curricular and instructional innovation” (pg. 16).

Standard 3.1 points to institutions’ need to have faculty and staff “sufficient in number, professional qualification, and diversity” (pg. 18). In addition, according to Standard 3.2, “Faculty and staff recruitment, hiring, orientation, workload, incentives, and evaluation practices” must be “aligned with institutional purposes and educational objectives,” not used for revenge, political persecution, or popularity contests (pg. 18). Perhaps most importantly, WASC states that an “institution’s leadership, at all levels” must demonstrate “integrity, high performance, appropriate responsibility, and accountability” (pg. 19).

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After speaking at length with Dr. Lopez and reading his publications as well as his court documents, we have managed to gather the following summary of incidents, in which the standards above are violated.

At CSU Northridge itself, Dr. Lopez seems to have been subject to a preposterous number of false accusations and malicious investigations. Some details are available in a piece published by First Things (http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/10/a-tale-of-targeting ) . Additional issues not included in the First Things article are expanded below.

Physical Intimidation and Defamation, 2009-2012

Dr. Chester Dunkberry, now a professor at Chapman University, “outed” Lopez’s life story at a CSUN department function in the spring of 2009. The occasion was a reception to honor the memory of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Dr. Lopez was in his first year on campus but was encouraged by Dr. Dunkberry to share his story of being raised in a queer family, so Dr. Lopez forwarded an autobiographical paragraph to Dr. Dunkberry via email. While Dr. Lopez felt uncomfortable about attending the function and revealing this at his job, Dr. Dunkberry had someone else read the life story aloud to the guests, most of whom were fellow English professors.

Following this event, Dr. Lopez was approached by various colleagues who assumed he was supportive of gay parenting and gay marriage. In the course of conversation, Dr. Lopez revealed ambivalence and criticism, which surprised people. Then his life in the department changed radically. Dr. Dunkberry turned extremely hostile, often refusing to acknowledge Dr. Lopez when they were in the same room, and on two occasions condemning or mocking Dr. Lopez on the department discussion boards. In the summer and fall of 2009, a pattern emerged of increasing interpersonal aggression toward Dr. Lopez, blatant rudeness, and then complaints about Dr. Lopez delivered namelessly through back channels. Dr. Glen Gettleton was Dr. Lopez’s supervisor, 2008-2011. In roughly ten different meetings with Dr. Gettleton, Dr. Lopez had to defend himself against anonymous complaints about his Facebook page, private emails he sent through his university account, flyers on his door, and publications on his blog, which he took down under pressure from the chair and dean.

Throughout the fall of 2009, Dr. Lopez was surrounded by controversy because Dr. Dunkberry and Dr. Zachary Giblets expressed staunch opposition to Dr. Lopez’s research grant from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. These colleagues denounced the grant on the department discussion boards. Dr. Giblets unveiled a new anti-war work-in-progress, a play featuring a protagonist with uncomfortable similarities to Dr. Lopez, and Dr. Giblets staged an informal performance of this play one week before a conference Dr. Lopez organized on gender research and national security. The latter event, which featured a guest speaker from the Central Intelligence Agency, attracted a mob of protestors, numerous

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obscene and racist emails sent to Dr. Lopez, and a great deal of tumultuous debate on the department discussion board, from which Dr. Lopez withdrew voluntarily in October 2009.

In the spring of 2011, after being the target of vandalism, obscene anonymous hate mail, and hostile conduct from his colleagues for almost two years, Dr. Lopez found the campus police unwilling to interview witnesses or to take any substantive action to ensure his safety. In fact, he was called in by his chair, Glen Gettleton, and chastised for blogging about his experience.

In 2011, Dr. Lopez filed a police report with Percy Klackenhack, one of the campus police officers, but Klackenhack never contacted the witnesses who had seen Dr. Lopez’s office door disfigured with sharp objects, and his American flag and Army stickers torn during Dr. Lopez’s military leave of absence (taken in 2010).

In May 2012, Dr. Lopez’s colleague Tallulah Cake threatened to video-record him and expose him for “laughing” in a racist way at graduation. She did this while goading her colleagues in Central American Studies to stalk Dr. Lopez with their I-pad video-recorders and while berating him in front of graduating students. Dr. Cake told Dr. Lopez that they had video to humiliate him in the eyes of the entire campus community.

An hour after the exchange described above, Dr. Cake went to the office of Dr. Lopez’s chair, Betsy D’Urbevilles, accompanied by Dr. Sheena Malhotra, a Women’s Studies professor, to lodge a complaint against Dr. Lopez alleging that he was racist and guilty of sexual harassment for supposedly saying the word “porn” and laughing at insensitive comments.

Later, Dr. Lopez received a phone call from the chair reporting that Dr. Cake brought six people from the Central American Studies department to the English chair’s office to make even more provocative claims against him and to threaten to release the videotape of his laughing. Dr. Lopez wrote a lengthy memo in response refuting all these allegations and sent it to the chair but was never told of the resolution of this complaint.

In late 2012 and during all of 2013, there was a great deal of harassment, chronicled by Lopez at http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/10/a-tale-of-targeting. These events are too complex to recount in the present letter.

The university’s denial of due process to Dr. Lopez, 2011-2013

In January 2011, after speaking with Penelope Jennings, the university attorney, about the harassment and intimidation in his department, Dr. Lopez consulted with the California Faculty Association about the best way to ensure that his tenure review would not be corrupted. The CFA deemed the matter an issue relating to Dr. Lopez’s protected statuses as a Puerto Rican, Christian, bisexual, and Army reservist, so he was directed to the

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office of Equity and Diversity. In the spring of 2011, Dr. Lopez filed a complaint with the university’s Equity and Diversity office.

In 2011, Dr. Lopez met with Susan Hua, a diversity attorney employed by CSUN, and submitted written summaries of his experience. In May 2011, based on certain promises, Dr. Lopez withdrew the complaint and closed the case. He did so based on assurances that [1] someone who had antagonized him, Dr. Zachary Giblets, would not serve on his personnel review and that [2] the Dean, Elizabeth Say, would provide him with written policies about the appropriate boundaries regarding social media policy. Elizabeth Say never provided him with any written policies as promised. Dr. Zachary Giblets was later placed on his personnel review committee when Dr. Lopez had to go up for tenure in the spring of 2013, contrary to the terms of Dr. Lopez’s withdrawing of the 2011 complaint.

Illegal Discrimination in Promotion Practices, 2012-13

In January 2012, Dr. Lopez submitted a Personnel Information File informing his department that he would like to be reviewed for early promotion to Associate Professor after four years of service at the university. The year before, two of his colleagues, Vance Orlebray and Calpernius Plum, were given early promotion after four years of service. Dr. Lopez’s chair, Betsy D’Urbevilles, and his dean, Elizabeth Say, told Dr. Lopez that he could not qualify for early promotion because he had been serving the U.S. Army for a semester (spring 2010) and therefore had less service time than Dr. Orlebray or Prof. Plum.

Dr. Lopez pointed out that the above-mentioned disposition on his promotion violated the Uniformed Services Employment and Re-employment Rights Act (USERRA), but was pressured by department members not to make any noise because he ought not to start trouble again. To explain the discrepancies, Dr. D’Urbevilles said Dr. Orlebray and Professor Plum had not arrived at CSU Northridge with one year of external service credit as Dr. Lopez did (in fact, they had.)

Defamation by Anonymous “Students,” 2013-14

The California Code of Regulations Title 5, Article 2, defines academic misconduct to include students’ furnishing false information to university employees.

In January 2013, Dr. Lopez presented his case for tenure. During the requisite interview with his panel of five department reviewers, he was told of accusations from anonymous students, whom two of his colleagues claimed to have spoken with. These accusations involved “personal revelations” and hatred against liberals, which Dr. Lopez was certain were outright falsehoods. The committee nonetheless baked these allegations into his tenure review letter. While Dr. Lopez did receive tenure, all five of the levels that reviewed him repeated these allegations.

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In February 2013, roughly two weeks after the meeting with his department reviewers who alleged misconduct in the classroom, Dr. Lopez was called into the office of Equity and Diversity and investigated for alleged sexual harassment. The accuser, Louis Yellowrose, claimed that Dr. Lopez had erections in class. The university attorney actually questioned Dr. Lopez about the status of his arousal in the classroom in front of Dr. Lopez’s lawyer, Mr. Charles LiMandri. The university attorney also called in several students and asked them whether Dr. Lopez’s penis became erect while he was teaching. Some circumstances of this bizarre investigation, which ended with provost Harry Hellenbrand throwing out all the charges, can be found in Dr. Lopez’s attached article for First Things, “A Tale of Targeting.”

On November 6, 2014, Dr. Lopez was called at home by the chair of classics and admonished for not providing a grading rubric to his mythology students (Dr. Lopez has degrees in English and ancient Classics). The admonition was based on falsehood, for the rubric was included in the syllabus. Apparently ten individuals claiming to be students in the mythology class visited the chair and lodged false claims that he did not give students grading rubrics. Dr. Lopez was told to change the class requirements and replace a paper with a final exam, without having the chance to demonstrate that the students’ complaint was false. Then Dr. Lopez received an email stating that he would not be allowed to teach Greek and Roman Mythology in the spring.

On December 12, 2014, Dr. Lopez was called in to speak with his dean, Elizabeth Say. He arrived with a union representative but the dean’s secretary, Eunice Blatt, told the union representative she was not welcome at the meeting. Dr. Lopez insisted on having his union representative present, and the secretary relented.

At the December 12 meeting, Dean Say told Dr. Lopez that unnamed students had complained about the fact he went on paternity leave (Dr. Lopez became the father of a son in October 2014), then canceled some classes to present research at conferences. Dean Say claimed that since Dr. Lopez went on paternity leave, this precluded him from doing research travel; in fact this conflicts directly with the definition of paternity leave benefits in the California Faculty Association’s collective bargaining agreement, and prima facie constitutes discrimination against Dr. Lopez based on his marital status, a protected class.

Dr. Lopez tried three times to show documentation that would disprove the complaints, but the dean refused to look at his evidence and told him she was determined to place a derogatory memo in his file. She told him, as well, “the work you do makes people very angry and they want to come heckle you; I can’t stop them,” in response to Dr. Lopez’s concerns about harassment and threats he received.

Dean Say made a number of false claims, which she said were based on the complaints of anonymous “students.” The falsehoods included telling Dr. Lopez he could not go to conferences during the school year based on the research he did, accusing him of violating university policy, alleging that he

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did not tell his department he was going to be gone, and telling him he would have to take unpaid leaves of absence to do research in the future.

Dean Say then placed a “confirmation memo” in his Personnel Action File, threatening to take further disciplinary action against him.

In January 2015, Dr. Lopez refuted all the major accusations in the file by providing evidence that he did not breach university policy, was entitled to paternity leave based on the collective bargaining agreement, did notify people in writing that he would be gone, and was gone for only one week, rather than two weeks as her “confirmation memo” implied.

Dean Say removed the memo full of false accusations and replaced it with another reprisal letter, claiming falsely that she never took issue with Dr. Lopez’s travel (she did, during the December 12, 2015 meeting), and rephrasing her complaint as concern that he did not call her personally to let her know that he was going to be gone. Dean Say never apologized for placing defamatory claims in Dr. Lopez’s personnel file.

Corrupt and Malicious Hiring and Evaluation Practices, 2014-15

In the summer of 2014, the English department held elections for a search committee, to hire a new faculty member in Dr. Lopez’s field of early (pre-1865) American literature. Dr. Lopez is the only member of the English department with recent publications and competency in this field; he was nominated for and ran for the committee.

In a secret online balloting process, the department elected a committee comprised of three professors with no background in American literature. Dr. Lopez was not permitted to serve on the committee although he has, indisputably, the resume most closely matching the terms of the search. One of the three elected, Samantha Crabb, was not even in the English department, serving rather in Program X. She appears to have directed several other search committees in Program X simultaneously. The other two elected were junior faculty members with no books published in early American literature (Dr. Lopez’s monograph on this came out in 2011 with Rowman & Littlefield.) The three search committee members were all experts, instead, in British culture.

By the autumn of 2014 the search committee described above drafted a job ad that got published in the MLA Job Information List, purporting to solicit applications from “trans-Atlantic” scholars with joint expertise in British and American literature. Given the disproportionate number of department faculty with specializations in American literature and the shortage of Britishists, Dr. Lopez lobbied for the search to focus simply on recruiting an assistant professor of British literature. The search committee members only had qualifications to review British literature scholars anyway. Dr. Lopez also suggested that they would not find people with joint expertise in both fields for such a broad and important historical period (1700-1900) and he posted this concern on the department listserve, but was unheeded. Dr.

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Lopez’s chair and dean did not intervene in this search to correct the mismatch between the search committee and the field of expertise, with troubling results: by January 2015, the short list of three candidates ended up including no applicant with expertise in British literature, contrary to the job ad the department approved and which had been published in the MLA Job List. That no applicant in the entire United States could be found with expertise in British literature strains credulity and raises questions about the motivations for eliminating candidates in order to arrive at this short list.

Not only did the above-mentioned three-person search team not produce, as they promised to do, a short list of candidates with expertise in both American and British literature, but then they surprised the entire department in February 2015, by announcing that they were going to attempt to hire not one but two new faculty members, both in Dr. Lopez’s field, having been vetted by three people with no expertise in that field.

During the campus visits, job talks of the new candidates were scheduled during the time that Dr. Lopez was teaching and efforts to have them rescheduled were unsuccessful. Dr. Lopez was not allowed to attend the teaching demonstrations of the job candidates, nor to review the dossiers of the candidates who had been surreptitiously rejected.

At the department meeting in February 2015, when the surprise proposition of hiring two Americanists was presented before all English faculty, Dr. Lopez raised objections but was interrupted by a half-dozen of his colleagues, told to “trust his colleagues” who were elected, and hurried into voting up or down on a ranking of candidates without having had any chance to discuss the search in detail with the search committee.

In the end, the department never received an explanation of what happened but only one person was hired to fulfill the search, a candidate focusing on trans-Pacific connections between American and Asian literature. The new hire, while wonderfully qualified to teach literature, could in no way be said to match the job ad that the department’s search committee, contrary to abundant advice, placed in the MLA Job List.

In the spring of 2015, Dr. Lopez’s chair emailed the entire English department asking for people to run for vacant seats on college committees. Dr. Lopez placed his name up for a seat on the College Personnel Committee. When there were only four faculty members running for four slots, and therefore it seemed inevitable that Dr. Lopez would be placed on the committee, Dr. Lopez’s chair and dean both sent out mass emails asking for more people to run for the committee. They were able to get an additional person to run, and Dr. Lopez was voted off the committee. This was an unusual manipulation of elections, of a kind that Dr. Lopez cannot recall ever happening before.

Corrupt, Incompetent, and Discriminatory Use of Travel Funding, 2014-15

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Trying to resolve the confusing status of his travel funds, Dr. Lopez emailed his chair and dean in late December 2014, in order to discuss his travel for 2015. Though she had just placed a reprisal letter in his file complaining that Dr. Lopez did not speak personally with her about travel in the past, Dean Say declined to meet with him personally. She told him to meet with his chair. Dr. Lopez’s chair did not respond to requests for a meeting.

Dr. Lopez was invited to present research at a summit held at Catholic University on March 27, 2015. Dr. Lopez’s dean and chair had both declined to speak personally with him about the best way to clear this travel with CSUN. Dean Say rejected the application to approve this travel through the online system for travel authorization, claiming that “CanaVox,” the group that sent Dr. Lopez the invitation letter, was not a legitimate academic group, even though the event was tied to Catholic University. The travel policy cited by the Dean to reject the application included a clause about “societies’” meetings as legitimate use of research funds if the faculty member is presenting. The dean used her discretion and did not respect this clause.

Dr. Lopez then submitted a letter signed by a provost of Catholic University of America to clarify the official status of the roundtable conference. Dr. Lopez received an email from his chair, Betsy D’Urbevilles, six days after the summit, informing him that his application was again rejected because it was submitted too close to the date of the conference, with no consideration for the fact that the delay was the result of the dean insisting that she would only approve the travel upon receiving a highly placed letter.

Likelihood of More Harassment Planned and Pending

The list goes on for much longer than we could possibly summarize here. Unless the pattern of harassment has somehow changed after five years, it is probable that more “investigations” and charges are pending, subject to gag orders disallowing Dr. Lopez from discussing them publicly.

As daughters of gay parents, we are deeply concerned about the mounting, concerted interference with Dr. Lopez's academic freedom, which seems to stem solely from the fact that he holds an unpopular position and has a life experience that defies easy categories.

As the Chancellor of CSU, you oversee the only university system that includes a grown child of gays actively engaged in independent, interdisciplinary research on gay parenting. You carry the historic burden to uphold academic freedom, anti-discrimination protections, and scholarly integrity.

Children of gay parents are only now attaining a critical mass and speaking for themselves as representatives of diverse opinions about the balance between LGBT rights and the rights of children. Please do not allow efforts to intimidate and discredit Dr. Lopez to succeed, as he plays a critical role within the academic community in this field. Bowing to pressures which seek to stifle or remove Dr.

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Lopez’s voice from your university would defeat your objective to make your campuses “open forums for free expression of ideas and diverse views”. See http://www.aaup.org/our-programs/government-relations/gr-archive/academic-bill-rights-intellectual-diversity/resources.

Sincerely,

Moira Greyland, TexasBrandi Walton, OklahomaDenise Shick, North CarolinaB.N. Klein, OhioHeather Barwick, MarylandKaty Faust, WashingtonDawn Stefanowicz, OntarioMillie Fontana Foxx, Australia

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Individual Statements of Support

Moira Greyland

To whom it may concern:

Every university today is rightly concerned with themes of diversity and alternative perspectives.  Robert Oscar Lopez provides such a perspective, as the child of gays, and brings a healthy alternative perspective to the monolithic view so often presented of LGBT families.

If he is silenced, not only is diversity a sham, since it will not represent an important perspective, but in the future it will be known that only certain viewpoints are permissible, which is censorship: an untenable position for a university to hold.

I have been so glad to hear Mr. Lopez’ story since it mirrored so many aspects of my own.  I was raised by three gay parents, and I was constantly aware that it was my “job” to carry the traditions of my family forward.  I felt uncomfortable being female because being female was “wrong” in a family of very soft men and very hard women, and any trace of traditional femininity was hammered out of me by my mother’s derision and my father’s condescending pity.  

It was understood that I was never going to be wanted by a man because all men, according to my father, were secretly homosexual, and both of my parents very much wanted me to be gay.  Before you say that this is outrageous, let me ask just one question: if gays can have children, why is it wrong for them to want their children to grow up to be just like them?

I have learned, slowly, to be OK with being a girl, and even with being straight.  I came out as straight to my parents when I was eighteen, and gradually I learned to trust that some men were actually straight and would want me.

Finding that other children of gays had struggles with trying to be homosexual and being gender-confused marked a turning point in my life.  There are other children of gays who need to know they’re not alone in their struggles.  It is vital that you let Robert Oscar Lopez’ voice be heard, as an important counter to this seemingly one-sided issue.

Sincerely yours, 

Moira Greyland

Brandi Walton

To Whom It May Concern,

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I am frankly appalled that the academy has not done more to protect one of its own and protect the free exchange of ideas and information that places of higher learning are supposed to support and encourage. As children of the LGBTQ Community we have an inalienable right to discuss and encourage opinions about the life we lived and the effects that being raised such as we were has had on our lives. It is sad to me that such is the condition of our world today that I am having to write this letter in defense of a man who has no ill will toward any of his fellow human beings, and yet is constantly the target of vicious attacks. I implore you to do the right thing and recognize that nothing homophobic nor bigoted was perpetrated by Professor Lopez, and protect his studies from those who seek to block his work.

Thank you for your time,

Brandi Walton

Denise Shick

To whom it may concern:

I wish to express how important and beneficial it is for children of gays to have healthy debates of our experiences. It takes many years to talk and overcome some of the difficulties that we face as children. Our freedom to express and share from our experiences in a healthy manner brings an understanding to both sides of this issue. This is not done out of malice toward others, but rather out of the rights of adult children who in a sense were forgotten, or rather believed not to exist.

Some of us adult children do not practice a faith, while others do, but the most important component we have discovered is having others who understand us, no matter how young or old we may be or no matter one’s faith (or no faith).

As American citizens we all have the freedom of speech no matter the topic one wishes to speak on. Because of our freedom of speech, we have equal rights to speak from the situations we each have come from. After all, this is the right each person wants and deserves.

Academic conferences or debates where people can question what it is like having a gay parent, helps the students learning from those who have lived out their own struggles coming out from under their own situations.

Sincerely,

Denise Shick

B.N. Klein

Dear Chancellor White,

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I am writing as one of the daughters of the LGBT community on behalf of academic freedom and Professor Robert Oscar Lopez. I write not only as a child of gays. I also write as a contingent faculty member, who like Professor Lopez has been harassed and blacklisted by LBGT activists who have launched campaigns. They have sent 100’s of emails to other faculty and administrators to block me from teaching and publication. Likewise, they have written to editors of major journals to block me from publishing.

We have faced a serious well-documented pattern of silencing and harassment. Suppression of research and of expression is creating a new dark age. And sadly the academy is playing point man in witch-hunts. Make no mistake, the sole purpose of defining Professor Lopez’s scholarship and research as “discriminatory” is to silence the voices of the children of gays who express anything that contradicts the well crafted media narrative of growing up the gay community.

This neo-McCarthyism is worse than McCarthyism in whom it targets and the way it creates a form of anti-intellectualism and silences the free exchange of discourse and ideas. It begs the question, why are LGBT scholars and researchers and allies supported and encouraged to pursue lines of research about the children being raised in LGBT homes, which draw self-serving conclusions, yet the children themselves are harassed and silenced? In the future this Orwellian collusion will be read as emblematic of an entire era of academic corruption, an intellectual blackout, created for pet political groups and at the expense of others.

Sincerely,

B.N. Klein

Heather Barwick

Robert Oscar Lopez offers an important perspective and one that is shared by many other children of gays.  For many years I felt isolated as I struggled to understand my experience being raised by two lesbians.  It seemed everyone was telling me that I should be “just fine” but I wasn’t. When I first read Robert Oscar Lopez’s writing it resonated deeply with me. There are many differences between us, yet so much of my experience echoed his.  All children of gays deserve a voice.  Too often, we are bullied and shamed for telling the truth about our own lived experiences.  I urge you to consider the critical perspective and information that Robert Oscar Lopez brings to the table and to allow him to continue to bring much needed thought and debate to the issue.

Sincerely,  

Heather Barwick 

Katy Faust

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My husband is getting his doctorate. I am a Fulbright scholar. But I wonder if I will send my four children to a State University or liberal arts college upon high school graduation. After watching Dr. Lopez undergo such opposition for sharing what should be common sense (or at minimum innocuous speech)- that children suffer trauma when they are separated from their natural parents, that men and women are different and offer distinct complimentary benefits in child rearing, that children should not be bought and sold, and that they are at increased risk for all manner of social ills when one or both parents are missing- I have my doubts that today’s, or tomorrow’s, college experience will offer my children a true free exchange of ideas.

I am at the beach today. My children and I are spending a glorious week with my mother and her partner. They are wonderful, generous, tender-hearted women and beloved members of our extended family. A child would be blessed to have either one as a mother. The problem is that neither of them would be a good father. And children actually desire, long for, and have a right to both their mother and father. It is a statement like that which seems to have no place in academia these days. And with the removal or silencing of Dr. Lopez, your university system will move away from being a center for learning toward an institution of indoctrination. I hope that you stand for right, and allow academic freedom to take its rightful place at the center of this, and every other, political, sociological, and anthropological debate.

Sincerely,

Katy Faust

Dawn Stefanowicz I know Robert Lopez, and he offers support to children of LGBT parents and has the background to present different ideas in academic settings. When he shares our stories and research concerning marriage, parenting and family, he is bringing together diverse ideas which need to be heard by students on campuses across the country. Bobby respects and tolerates different perspectives from us children, even though none of us agrees on every point. We desire to express our various perspectives and insights in a tolerant environment and have every right to do so. Freedom of speech is incredibly important to the exchange of ideas and democracy. Furthermore, freedom of speech on college and university campuses is vital to academic freedom. When speech is limited or banned, your academic space is no longer free. When it comes to children of LGBT parents, we have every human right to discuss and share our own backgrounds, and our thoughts and feelings in the public sphere, which include campuses across the country. There should be no speech codes which would restrict the speech of children of LGBT parents. There is never just one side to issues which impact us under the LGBT umbrella. Rather, there are multi-faceted sides which need to be expressed freely without limits or fears of hurting people's feelings. There are already existing legal remedies for defamation, threats and assault, without limiting freedom of speech. 

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Thanks,Dawn Stefanowicz Author of Out From Under: The Impact of Homosexual Parenting

Millie Fontana Foxx

I must extend concerns from Australia regarding a highly unethical attempt to silence the ever-growing base of children negatively affected by same sex parenting. As children of gays, it is already extremely difficult for us to express our experiences and opinions on the topic of our upbringing. We face rejection from our peers, "shaming" from our parents and overall demonisation from the very same community promoting the love and acceptance that is leading some to discriminate against Robert Lopez for being a minority.I am dismayed that the field of education, where people are allegedly open to an evolving society, would reject the story of a man who's personally endured the gay community’s incorrect accusation of homophobia. The gay community has been encouraged to speak freely, and as their children it's now our right of passage to "come out" too.There is a major difference between expressing an educated opinion, and religious homophobia.I urge you not to perpetuate the same cycle of discrimination once inflicted on the gay community, on behalf of the gay community.

Regards,

Millie Fontana Foxx.

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CC: Officials in Field of Education

James Campbell, Alliance Defending Freedom (jcampbell@alliancedefendingfreedom.org)

Brian Duggan, National Organization for Marriage (bduggan@nationformarriage.org)

Rosemary Feal, Executive Director, Modern Language Association (rfeal@mla.org)

Elaine M. Howle, Cal. State Auditor (https://www.auditor.ca.gov/contactus/complaint)

Mal Kline, Accuracy in Academia (mal.kline@academia.org)Charles Limandri, Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund

(CLimandri@limandri.com)

Matthew Malkan, California Association of Scholars (matt.malkan@gmail.com)

Teresa Mendoza, Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (TMendoza@limandri.com)

Mary Ellen Petrisko, WASC Senior Colleges & Universities (mepetrisko@wascsenior.org)

Gregory Scholtz, American Association of University Professors (gscholtez@aaup.org)

Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce TrainingU.S. House of Representatives

Virginia Foxx, North Carolina (Chairwoman) David P. Roe, Tennessee Matt Salmon, Arizona Brett Guthrie, Kentucky Lou Barletta, Pennsylvania Joe J. Heck, Nevada Luke Messer, Indiana Bradley Byrne, Alabama Carlos Curbelo, Florida Elise Stefanik, New York

Rick Allen, Georgia

U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions

Lamar Alexander, TennesseeMichael B. Enzi, WyomingRichard Burr, North CarolinaJohnny Isakson, GeorgiaRand Paul, KentuckyTim Scott, South CarolinaOrrin Hatch, UtahPat Roberts, KansasBill Cassidy, M.D., Louisiana

Others:

Tim Walberg, Michigan

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Darrell Issa, CaliforniaMiMi Walters, CaliforniaDuncan Hunter, CaliforniaTom McClintock, California

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