Reporting for the Washington Post, Ed O’Keefe reported on Wednesday that the oldest gay rights organization in the United States, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, will now be known as The National LGBTQ Task Force. “In light of growing support and a shift in judicial thinking, we want to reflect the next era of the LGBTQ movement and our country,” Rea Carey, the group’s executive director, said in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday. “We need to look beyond marriage, to tear down the other barriers for LGBTQ members to participate in society. There’s a lot of issues that face our lives that marriage simply doesn’t portend to.”
According to their Web site, their mission is to build the grassroots power of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community. It was founded in 1973 (as the National Gay Task Force) by Dr. Howard Brown, Dr. Bruce Voeller, who was the organization’s first director, Reverend Robert Carter and Dr. Frank Kameny, in New York. The name “National Gay and Lesbian Task Force” was adopted in 1985 and, this week, changed its name again. (The Policy Institute of the National LGBTQ Task Force is a think tank that conducts social science research, policy analysis, strategy development, public education and advocacy.)
In a release explaining the decision to supporters which was released Wednesday morning, Carey explains that “there is a deep desire for more change, to look beyond marriage equality, with millions of us still facing formidable barriers in every aspect of our lives: at school, in housing, employment, in health care, in our faith congregations, in retirement and in basic human rights We have a vision of things beyond legal equality. For example, we have a federal hate crimes law and many states have hate crimes laws that are inclusive of LGBTQ people. But to be able to be truly free would be to walk down the street, holding hands with your partner and not fearing that you’ll be hit over the head with a bottle. Winning marriage doesn’t erase the fact that people will still face violence because of their sexual preference or gender identity.”
The organization recently broke ranks with President Obama during talks over how to proceed with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). As Obama made it increasingly clear that he would give religious organizations an exemption from any policy proposals. “They feared that broad religious exemptions included in the current bill might compel private companies to begin citing objections similar to those that prevailed in a U.S. Supreme Court case to strike down a key part of President Obama’s health care law,” O’Keefe wrote.
