Megan Hoelle's blog

This week concludes my four years of service here at Intersections. It has been an incredible journey to see this organization grow from an idea held by a handful of people in one room to a robust not-for-profit leading national campaigns and making a real difference in people’s lives. The magic of Intersections is that it consistently brings together those unexpected voices to a common table, the results of which are transformative.

We the People
Today, Intersections as part of its work with Prepare New York, released an educational video tracing America’s journey since 1787 to become a “more perfect union.” The video shows the struggles we’ve had as a nation to live up to our founding principle of religious freedom for all (which wasn’t actually included until the First Amendment was ratified in 1791).

As you know, last Mother’s Day Intersections launched our campaign to unite a million Christians for LGBT equality in the church.  The response has truly been inspiring. Six weeks later, the video has received almost 44,000 views, bloggers have written almost 100 stories and we have over 14,000 new friends on Facebook.

Just a brief update on the status of our Iraqi refugee friends in Syria. As the violence and protests increase in Syria, many Iraqis are choosing to return to Iraq.

There has been a lot of conversation at Intersections the last few weeks about making “viral videos.” For those of you who might not know what I’m even talking about (mom), according to Wikipedia, “A viral video is one that becomes popular through the process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites, social media and email…Humor is often a characteristic of viral videos, but not a defining one.”

March 19, 2003

President Bush: 'American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger'...

March 19, 2011

President Obama: 'Today we are part of a broad coalition. We are answering the calls of a threatened people. And we are acting in the interests of the United States and the world'...

What would it say? This week, we launched the new Believe Out Loud website with new and expanded resources and tools to help progressive Christians add their voice to the chorus for LGBT inclusion. As part of that effort, we’re asking people to take a minute and write themselves a love letter from God affirming that god loves them, just as they are (If you’d like to write one, we invite you to do so here).

The recent murder of Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato reminds us that hateful voices will remain dominant until we loudly offer the world an inclusive, Christian alternative.  Mr. Kato’s murder is a call to action, an opportunity for fair-minded Christians everywhere to tell the world our story of Christianity, a story centered in compassion, peace, respect and unconditional love for all God’s children.

It’s a new year, full of the promise of new beginnings. However, for many Iraqis it may feel a lot like a return to the bloody past. There have been a string of bombings in the last week and many unsettling headlines about Iraq:

The world is a buzz again today about the latest leak from the website WikiLeaks. On Sunday, 251,287 United States embassy cables were published on the site and given to newspapers around the world. According to the WikiLeaks website, this represents “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain...The cables, which date from 1966 to the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.”