Building Relationships Blessed by Difference

Headlines every day blare intolerance and animosity between LGBT people and religion. 
Between bathroom bills, cake cases and the common belief that LGBT people cannot be people of faith,
it’s easy to view faith and LGBT as a divide that not only will never go away and in fact may finally rend the frayed garment of civil society in the United States.

Regardless, we believe that faith, spirituality and yes, even religion, can unite, rather than divide.

Learn more below or on our Blessed By Difference website

What we do

Parity provides workshops for those people, faith organizations, businesses and schools that wish to learn how to find the positives - the blessings - of difference.

Email us - let’s talk about your needs.

our advocacy

We wade directly into the issues that most divide communities and work to bring “sides” together and then to collaborate to make concrete difference through legislation and community change.

Our public voice

We co-author opinion pieces and provide guidance with surprising partners, seeking collaboration and compromise towards the promotion of the health and well-being of all people, particularly LGBTQia people and marginalized communities.

We work with Respect + Rebellion, speaking about ways that differences are blessings and actually a way forward for not only better understanding, but better outcomes for people in need. See our Speaker Pair Page.

About Respect + Rebellion:
American college campuses deserve a speaker series worthy of the American embrace of competing ideas to innovate. Respect + Rebellion aims to provide it.

Universities have long been seen and experienced in Western cultures as a place where the ideals of free inquiry and deliberative democracy are embodied. But in recent years – and the fury of the American political debate has accelerated and people have isolated themselves in tribal media silos – colleges across the nation have become front-page news for alarming instances of censoring particular voices and protests escalating to near violence when two ideas come into conflict. Universities may now represent a kind of collective “canary in the coal mine” suggesting that the enlightenment value of the pursuit of truth is at real risk in such polarized times.

If escalating anger has a chance of becoming constructive engagement, it won’t happen with a lame finger wag about how we’re supposed to behave, it will be because we remembered that jumping into conversations about competing ideas is fascinating and it’s the conversation we deserve.

There is so much we see in this generation of college students that suggests “hero generation” is an apt description for them – they have broadly shown a heroic devotion to protection of vulnerable groups in society, to causes larger than themselves, to a worldwide sense of justice and progress. We think they’re poised for this challenge.

Respect + Rebellion is a project of The Village Square.