Feminist blogger Barry Deutsch (aka Ampersand) recently conducted an interview with Paige Flink, the Executive Director of The Family Place, concerning the controversy over their recent ads (pictured above). The ads were placed on 45 Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) buses. We conducted a highly-publicized campiagn against them last month.

Below are some of my responses to the answers Flink gave to Deutsch's questions.

Deutsch asks: Glenn Sacks claimed his activists convinced some regular Family Place supporters to withhold donations. Have you seen any evidence of that from your end?

Flink replies: The only thing I know for sure is I got an email from a man who said he’d never give again, because of this. He once gave $25, in 2003. It’s possible that [Sacks] convinced somebody besides that one donor.

Sacks responds: Not true, although to be fair to Ms. Flink, she probably has no way of knowing about all of the people who didn't contribute or who reduced their contributions in light of the controversy.

Also, the campaign was not simply done by "Glenn Sacks' activists"--Fathers & Families, a national shared parenting organization, was my partner in the campaign. F & F's Executive Director is Dr. Ned Holstein, MD, MS, a public health specialist.

Deutsch asks: Have you heard from any of your donors who had been contacted by Glenn’s campaign?

Flink replies: Yes. They were horrified...Not about the ad campaign. Horrified that someone from outside the state of Texas would call and say “don’t give money to The Family Place.”

Sacks responds: Actually, many of the donors we contacted were horrified by the ads and thought they were an embarrassment to the Family Place.

Flink says: There was one of my board members who received 25 calls from the same woman.

Sacks responds: I doubt this, but if it happened, it certainly didn't happen with my sanction. If Ms. Flink would like to give me the name of this person, I will check the story out on my end and, if it's true, make sure this individual never has anything to do with one of our campaigns again.

Deutsch asks: What did the people calling them say?

Flink replies: It was… they were paraphrasing, so I don’t know exactly. They were told that you should not support The Family Place. This is a terrible campaign, they’re not a good organization, you should not support The Family Place, and we’re asking you to stop donating to The Family Place.

Sacks responds: We said it was a terrible campaign, and many of the donors agreed, as have numerous domestic violence authorities, medical & mental health professionals, educators, family law attorneys & prominent citizens.

Our list of campaign endorsers can be seen here.  It includes many prominent domestic violence authorities, including Dr. Donald Dutton, former member of the OJ Simpson prosecution team and author of Rethinking Domestic Violence; Erin Pizzey, a British family care activist who founded the first modern battered women's shelter in 1971; Patricia Overberg, MSW, the former Director of the Valley Oasis Domestic Violence Shelter in Lancaster, CA; John Hamel, LCSW, author of Gender-Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse; Claudia Dias, MSC, a Domestic Violence Intervention Facilitator in Sacramento; Jan Brown, Founder and Executive Director of the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men and Women; Jayne A. Major, Ph.D., founder of Breakthrough Parenting Services in Los Angeles; and numerous others.

I would also add that The Family Place's ads were so offensive that two major billboard companies--Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor--rejected them. Jodi Senese of CBS said the ads "can be both misleading and disturbing."

Flink replies: Some of the vile language and verbal abuse we took on the phone was horrific. The kinds of things they said to our staff about what they’re going to do to them was awful. I’ve had some “you’re going to go to hell, you’re a fat lesbian luring women into those shelters so you can prey on them.”

Sacks responds: Like any good Executive Director, Ms. Flink is deft at public relations, and here's another example. She's conflating the calls made to The Family Place's financial contributors--calls made by a hand-selected small group (several of whom are mental health professionals), with calls made to The Family Place itself which were made without my sanction. I never asked my readers to call The Family Place--not once. When someone would post The Family Place's phone # in the comments section of my blog, I'd delete it. I'm not surprised that some of the callers were angry or rude, but I have tens of thousands of readers and I can't be expected to keep track of what each one of them does.

As for the alleged lesbian-bashing, I'm on the record publicly as a supporter of gay rights and gays' rights to marry. I've also publicized numerous cases of lesbian women being unfairly denied joint custody of their children after divorce or separation--an issue which the feminist left, which normally has a good record on gay rights, has ignored.

Deutsch asks: Did the campaign succeed in doing damage to The Family Place?

Flink replies: No, as a matter of fact, what he did was make us even more visible, in venues where we wouldn’t necessarily have been visible.

Sacks responds: Anytime one launches a high-profile protest one of the drawbacks is that you bring attention to the people you're protesting against. Our campaign generated a lot of media attention, particularly in light of the fact that we launched it a week before the presidential election. Ms. Flink obviously wanted attention and didn't care too much about negative attention--she made that clear in interviews she gave right after she put the ads up.

Flink replies: I want to make sure it’s clear that we had a 60 day contract on those buses. It is not true that we took down our ads down. That’s not true. It was always going to end on November 30 — that was all the money we had.

Sacks responds: I never said they took the ads down. From the beginning it was clear that the ads were coming down 11/30 and they did. I knew when we launched the campaign that DART would probably try to run out the clock, deflecting wide-spread criticism by saying "The ads are coming down soon anyway." That's exactly what they did. (DART also made a point of saying that the ads were only on the outsides of 45 out of 800 buses in their fleet.) Our success lay in other realms, which I explained here.

Flink says: I feel very strongly that the donors in this community understand what we’re doing in The Family Place. We have a lot of credibility.

Sacks responds: That may well be true, but their credibility was sapped by these embarassing ads and the protest against them.

Flink says: We have a page on our website that we did make gender-neutral in response.

Sacks responds: That was appropriate for The Family Place to do, and I commended them for it on several occasions.

Flink's ad campaign was wrong and the Domestic Violence establishment of which she's a part has many wrongheaded policies. During the campaign I called Ms. Flink to discuss the issue with her. I never received a phone call back, but in my voice mail I did commend her for the good work that her organization does on behalf of abused women. I'll reiterate that commendation here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under Domestic Violence/DV System, Fathers & Families Advocacy Group. You can trackback from your own site.