"Religion-based bigotry. Let's end it now and forever." Interview with Mitchell Gold

[Ian David]

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.)

More:
http://www.jewsonfirst.org/06b/faith_in_america.html