SALT LAKE CITY — With the World Congress of Families IX approaching, local and national LGBT advocacy groups are divided on how to respond and are in Salt Lake City this week engaging in their own conversations on faith and family.
Troy Williams, the executive director of Equality Utah, said his organization would not be protesting the conference as others have threatened to do, and said people "need to figure out a way to bring folks together.”
“Look at the work we’ve done here in this state, where we passed historic nondiscrimination legislation in March,” said Williams. “That was the LDS church sitting down with the LGBT community, Republicans sitting down with Democrats, atheists sitting down with nonbelievers.”
In the run-up to next week's conference, focused on celebrating and strengthening the "natural family," two other conferences are taking place this week.
The first, organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force, kicked off Tuesday in downtown Salt Lake City at the Radisson Hotel and continued Wednesday focused on supporting people of faith who are gay, lesbian, or gender non-conforming, said organizer Rodney McKenzie.
He said conference-goers intended to do their work "above and beyond the World Congress of Families.”
"I don't have to attack the World Congress of Families," said McKenzie, an ordained minister. "For me, what I have to do is challenge the narrative that they own faith. What we want to actually do is shift the narrative that all faith, all people of faith, are against LGBTQ people,” he said.
Following on the faith conference's heels is the Inclusive Families Conference, scheduled to take place Friday and Saturday. Although discussions about co-hosting an event with the World Congress of Families fell through, conference organizer Marian Edmonds-Allen said she remains “cautiously hopeful” that talks will continue.
Erika Munson, the co-founder of Mormons Building Bridges here in Utah, said the entrance of the World Congress of Families to the state had generated unexpected discussion.
"It's sort of the bright and shiny flip side of this difficult group, is that we've gotten conversation going," Munson said.
Next week family conference is hosted by the Sutherland Institute and is expected to bring thousands together to hear more than 200 scholars, religious leaders and motivational speakers to Salt Lake City.
Sutherland Institute chairman and interim president Stanford Swim said talks with local LGBT groups had been productive but did not result in an agreement to co-host an event due to differences between "what the conference expectations need to be and what other people's expectations need to be."
"There wasn't a good fit," Swim said.
Of the LGBT advocacy groups, only one — Restore Our Humanity — is planning to protest, according to director Mark Lawrence. On Wednesday, Lawrence and about 14 other people rallied in the Capitol rotunda in protest of Gov. Gary Herbert's decision to speak at the World Congress of Families. He will be one of a number of local political and religious leaders who will speak at the event.
Email: dchen@deseretnews.com
Twitter: DaphneChen_