Former NOW President Is YWCA's New CEO

CNSNews.com ^ | 4/30/03 | Randy Hall

[kattracks]

(CNSNews.com) - Patricia Ireland, the woman who presided over the National Organization for Women (NOW) for a decade and whose "major contributions included organizing NOW activists to defend women's access to abortion," has been chosen as the new chief executive officer of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA).

The appointment, confirmed by CNSNews.com, immediately drew criticism from cultural conservatives. Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, called the Ireland appointment "disgusting," pointing to reports that Ireland had carried on a homosexual relationship in Washington, D.C., while remaining married to her husband, who was living in Florida.

"Here's a woman who is a bisexual heading up a young women's organization," Lafferty said. "This organization (YWCA) was started by a religious revival, this organization was started by Godly women, and the original intent has been totally perverted," she added.

The YWCA's origins in the United States can be traced all the way back to 1858, according to the organization's website, but any original religious motivation has been downplayed.

It's not until the sixth paragraph of a YWCA web page called "The Early Years" that the organization acknowledges that Bible study was one of the group's original goals.

Ireland was president of NOW from 1991 until 2001. More to Come

[AuH2ORepublican]

If it wasn't April 30th instead of April 1st, I would have sworn it was an April Fool's Joke. This is like making Barney Frank president of the Boy Scouts.

[CaptBlack]

In a way, though, this is nothing new, although admittedly sad and angering.
From all I've ever seen, this is the way Darkness operates. Christians go out and start great and honorable enterprises at their own personal risk and when the endeavor has achieved the status of Institution (and much of the danger or personal risk is gone), the leadership gets complacent and their descendants ultimately lose touch with the original spirit and purpose of the whole effort. It's not long after that that you find people running the institution who have NO CONNECTION whatsoever with its genius and who, in many cases, are of a spirit totally antithetical to that which founded the enterprise.

Go down the list of great American institutions, for example: Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Oberlin and so on. Or take the Providence hospital system, which I've observed firsthand moving slowly away from it's deep religious imperative to a mostly money-making big business. Even the Salvation Army (God bless them!) evidences the same sad history. Could I even suggest our own nation as something of an example?

All it says to me is that perversion is inherently UN-creative. It can only cling, parasitically, to what the Truth has done, and ultimately pervert and corrupt it to its own bitter ends.

Thus so for the YWCA, apparently...