As I sit reading comments about Salt Lake City being named the “Gayest City in America” by The Advocate, I wonder whether our history has been forgotten or if this community actively chooses to ignore import parts of it. As an umbrella group, we are extremely diverse with equally diverse needs and wants. For many, we want to be left alone. For others, we want to have our relationships treated as equal. For a portion, we just want to be allowed to be ourselves. The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is too diverse to have a single agenda. I want to share some highlights from our collective history.

As an accidental heterosexual and writer, I feel the necessity to speak of a subject uncomfortable to many. For silence is the great evil. In silence negative energy circles the globe. The law may hush the mind, but the heart may transcend the law. I am speaking of love.

At the molecular level, one could say that you and I are very similar. Any general biology class will dictate that all animals are composed of cells sharing the same structure. These minute fragments of my body specialize to form organs, tissue, and even blood. This same blood that courses through our veins eventually passes through the heart, the organ that so graciously provides life to all animals. After the heart pumps blood to the lungs, where it becomes saturated with oxygen, the blood makes its way to other parts of the body including the brain. The marvelous brain is capable of such a great range of thought and emotion. The only emotion that truly matters in our predicament, Mrs. Bachmann, is love. I love you as a brave woman and fellow human being. Will you love me back?

by Matt Foreman Imagine. To many of our opponents and even to many allies, the LGBT movement is a cohesive force for change. But despite our undeniable successes, particularly at the state and local level, we are not as cohesive as we might appear. And we are certainly not as cohesive as we...

by James Tidmarsh As 18-year-old Matthew Shepard lie in his hospital bed,  struggling to hold onto his life, a rumor began to circulate on conservative websites and elsewhere; the 1998 beating, in which Shepard was tied to a fence post in a Wyoming field and left to die, didn’t have...

By Pastor Dave Mallinak Two “either-or” fallacies mark the nondiscrimination debate. The first applies to the Ogden non-discrimination ordinance itself. If I do not support the ordinance, then I must favor discrimination. The second relates to my opposition to homosexuality. If I oppose...

by Peter Ryskewecz In the past 23 years, only two U.S. Congress persons have been shot at. Both are Jewish: Gabrielle Giffords, last week in Arizona, and Eric Cantor of Virginia, the new GOP House Majority Leader. Given the acceptance of class warfare and class resentment — with all its...

by Curtis Price My view, and many mainline churches views, boil down to how one understands the Bible.  Fundamentalists and many evangelicals read the Bible literally as though God dropped it from the sky one day all written out in the kings English.  I interpret the Bible with a “more...