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via We survived Bush. You will survive Obama.

“The thing that some people will never understand is that there is more than one type of family.” - WSBYSO

In January 2006, this happened in Kanab, Utah:

“[T]he mayor and city council passed Resolution 1-1-06R, titled The Natural Family: A Vision for the City of Kanab, codifying the definition of a ‘natural family’: ‘We envision a local culture that upholds the marriage of a man to a woman, and a woman to a man, as ordained of God… We see our homes as open to a full quiver of children, the source of family continuity and social growth. We envision young women growing into wives, homemakers, and mothers; and we see young men growing into husbands, home-builders, and fathers.’” Read more… 

To their credit, the good people of Kanab were mostly offended: “Family resolution divides Kanab” | Deseret News

Shortly after, in April of that year, UVUU, a small Unitarian Universalist fellowship in the socially conservative hub of predominantly Mormon (LDS) Utah, arranged a multi-denominational gathering to host a bus full of LGBT Soulforce students on their first Equality Ride through Utah, when the group protested at BYU in Provo. The joint UU/UCC/Presbyterian/Soulforce service, held at the Provo Community Church, made the front page of the Provo Herald accompanied by a photo of a gay couple attending the service side by side with local church members. The paper received some negative feedback, especially regarding the front-page photo (no longer available online), resulting in a follow-up editorial by the paper, “Should papers hide ‘bad’ news?”, which, alongside other observations, felt it necessary to point out to offended local readers that “a picture of a man with his arm around another in church is not pornographic.”

One of the sermons presented at the service, “Our Loving Family”, responds to the unnaturally narrow view of the “natural” family that was espoused in the Kanab resolution, instead witnessing in support of real “natural” families, which come in all shapes and sizes.

“When a child is in a stable, loving family relationship with adults — whether gay or straight, whether biological relatives or adoptive -­ if our culture or government then acts in ways to undermine or destabilize that family relationship, it cannot rightfully claim to be “pro-family,” nor that it puts “family first.”

A child (in fact, any individual) knows, better than any civic or church leader, or writer of “proclamations” of any sort, who makes up his or her “natural family.” If we are to claim, as a culture, as a state, as a church, as a nation, to be supportive of families, and claim that we seek to strengthen families — and especially if we claim that we’re doing so in order to ensure a stable, loving environment for children — we must then be supportive of, and seek to strengthen, actual, existing, stable families, as experienced by those children, regardless of those families’ structures.

We’ve heard it said that “the family is the basic unit of the church.” Indeed, “Our Loving Families” — as they actually exist, as stabilizing influences, and as loving and accepting and supportive home environments in our lives — are in fact the “basic units” which we need to be strengthening as a society, through both churches and government. We cannot undermine and devalue and destabilize these families, and still expect to nurture either a healthy society and community or a strong or a moral nation. Read more…

Soulforce Equality Ride 2012 is currently in Salt Lake City, at this very moment in “a historic meeting between the Soulforce Equality Riders and representatives of the LDS church to discuss what [they] view as policies and rhetoric that are harmful to the LGBTQ community.”