
Today's Out Spotlight is about a family who campaigned for the passage for Prop 8 in California. Why in the world would they be in the Out Spotlight? It is for what happened when their then 13 yr old son came out. Today's Out Spotlight it the Montgomery family and their son Jordan.

Wendy and Tom Montgomery are devout Mormons from California who pounded on doors in 2008 to support the passage of Proposition 8,
 the state referendum that overturned the ruling that allowed same-sex 
couples to marry in California, and is now before the U.S. Supreme 
Court.
They did not know that their now 14-year-old son, Jordan, was gay 
and would later contemplate suicide because of the church's steadfast 
belief that homosexuality is a sin that would cut him off from his 
family not only here on earth but in the afterlife.

"One of core tenets we believe in as Mormons is that the family is 
eternal in nature," Wendy Montgomery, 37, told ABCNews.com. "Our family 
units are really strong."
Raised in a conservative community in California, the mother of six 
children said she often heard things like "gay people are disgusting and
 immoral" and "AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality."
Until about age 13, their son Jordan had been the "happiest, most exuberant 
child,"  but then he began to withdraw from 
friends and family. Looking for answers, she found an entry in his 
journal describing his attraction to other boys, though he had never 
acted on those urges. The discovery shook his mom to the core.

"I felt like what I saw his life would be – what I expected his life to 
be – as a Mormon boy was now gone.  I saw him 
preparing for a mission for our church – gone. I saw a temple wedding – 
gone. I saw him being a father – gone."
"To be honest, before my son came out, I didn't know any other families 
who had gay kids," s "It's one of the things  that's not talked 
about in my church, which makes it so much harder to deal with and know 
who to go to for help."   

She found help from the 
Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University, 
.
 “It felt like a ray of sunshine in the middle of the darkest period of 
my life,” she said of the Family Acceptance Project. “It gave me hope.”
The Montgomery family's struggle to reconcile its faith with full 
acceptance of their son's sexual identity is at the heart of the video 
"Families Are Forever," which premiered at 
Frameline 37: the 
San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival.
The 20-minute piece produced by the Family Acceptance Project, was part of a planned series of 
short documentaries that depict the journey of ethnically and 
religiously diverse families to support their lesbian, gay, bisexual and
 transgender children.

In the short video, Jordan, a dark-haired boy with guileless eyes, 
explains that before his parents found out he was gay, he had considered
 taking "lots pills. ..."
"I was mortified at the idea of being disowned by my parents," Jordan 
says in the video,  "I was like, I do not want to be thrown
 out of my home. I definitely expected to be excommunicated and 
restricted from church. But I still wanted to be with the church, like, 
I'd grown up with it, it was my life … until now."
Jordan's parents who had fought against Prop 8 now fight for their gay son and have become advocates for acceptance and change.

At "
Circling the Wagons"
 a Mormon LGBT conference in San Francisco,  Tom shared a poem he wrote a poem about his son after he came out.  (
Read the poem here)
And mom Wendy summed up how having a gay child has changed her life this way:
 "I am a better person for having a gay son.  I love 
differently, and I love more openly. I didn't realize the judgment I had
 before I realized that having a gay son was a great blessing and not a 
burden."