Gay Rights: Secular, Religious Groups Working Together

This seems like good news to me:

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the country's oldest gay rights organization, announced Monday that a religious organization representing 1,400 Protestant congregations that unconditionally welcome gays and lesbians has merged with the task force.

Ideally, this could strengthen efforts for acceptance in the broader society as well as within the religious communities. Opposition to gay rights is largely religious in nature (or, more precisely, is usually rationalized in religious terms), so the struggle within the churches is inseparable from the broader struggle.

The article itself is another story. For one thing, they don't name the organization that's merging with the NGLTF until the seventh paragraph. (It's the Welcoming Resources Institute.) When you're writing a story about the merger of two entities, it seems kind of odd and dismissive not to identify one of them.

For another thing, consider the first two graphs:

The gay rights movement has found God.

After decades of working to change secular institutions, the national movement, which has largely convinced society that homosexuality is neither a mental disorder nor a crime, is focusing on what its leaders say is their last, and biggest, challenge: convincing believers that it's not a sin.

Kind of gives the impression that nobody's been doing this, doesn't it? That somebody just now had the idea?

I have personal reasons for being irritated: my parents helped found the Reconciling Congregations movement (now Reconciling Ministries Network), a network of gay-positive congregations within the United Methodist Church, some 20-plus years ago. Parallel efforts in other denominations also go back to the early '80s. To present it as if 'the gay rights movement has [just now] found God' is to ignore the long, difficult, often thankless struggle of gay and gay-positive believers to forge a more welcoming, inclusive church.

But enough kvetching. As I said, this is good news, and I look forward to whatever comes of it.

[That's all, folks]