Howard v. Arkansas - George Rekers Fact Sheet

Dr. George A. Rekers is the state's expert witness in Howard v. Child Welfare Agency Review Board, in which the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union represents three prospective foster parents in challenging a law that bars gay people and people in households with gay family members from foster parenting.

• Rekers is one of the founders of the Family Research Council, a notoriously anti-gay group.
• Rekers relies on the discredited research of Paul Cameron, an anti-gay ""researcher"" who was kicked out of the American Psychological Association for misrepresenting the research regarding homosexuality.
• Rekers has suggested that gays are unsuitable to serve as foster parents because they're at higher risk for AIDS and other sexually-transmitted disease, ignoring the fact that there is a physical examination required of all foster parent applicants in Arkansas that would weed out any applicants with health conditions that could jeopardize a foster child.
• Rekers says that children are best served when raised by both a mother and a father, but doesn't favor excluding single heterosexual single women from fostering.  
• Rekers is an ordained minister in the southern Baptist convention.  He has strong religious beliefs about homosexuality and the role of men and women, including the belief that married women should be submissive to their husband's leadership in the home.  
• Rekers practices ""conversion therapy,"" the attempt to ""cure"" people of being gay.
• Rekers has said he favors pulling children from long-term placements with gay foster parents if the opportunity arises to place them in homes headed by straight parents even though, as he acknowledges, research shows such transitions are traumatic for children.