NY Teacher Retirement System Urged to Dump Movie Gallery Stock
by Jim Brown
October 6, 2005
(AgapePress) - A pro-family group is calling on the New York State Teachers' Retirement System (NYSTRS) to divest of all stock holdings in the nation's largest retailer of triple-X porn videos and DVDs. The American Family Association (AFA) has written a letter to the president of the NYSTRS, asking the group to dump its more than one million shares of Movie Gallery stock. AFA Special Projects Director Randy Sharp insists that owning the video entertainment company's stock puts the teachers' retirement system in the hard-core porn business.
The NYSTRS owns "billions of dollars worth of stock," Sharp says, "and certainly supporting pornography is not one of the avenues that this organization should go down. There are a lot of great teachers in New York -- I'm sure that they would be shocked to know that their retirement is being funded by material that damages families."
The AFA Special Projects Director points out that pornography is not only devastating to marriages but also harmful to children in numerous ways. And those are only a few of the moral reasons why the NYSTRS "really needs to get out of the porn business," he says.
On the other hand, Sharp notes, the value of Movie Gallery stock has dropped nearly 70 percent in the past three months, which suggests to him that NYSTRS members would be wise to put their money elsewhere. "Not only are they investing in hard-core porn," the pro-family spokesman says, "they're losing thousands and thousands of dollars; and so it's not good moral business, and it's certainly not good business financially."
The American Family Association launched a boycott of Movie Gallery in 2000 in an effort to get the video empire to stop offering "back room" adult entertainment. The pro-family organization has documented episodes of harassment and vulgarity endured by employees and managers of locations that offer the pornographic videos, as well as horror stories from parents whose children have been exposed to hard-core porn in Movie Gallery stores.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
