Post submitted by Sharon Groves, former HRC Director, Religion and Faith Program

For equality-minded Evangelicals, there’s no other place to be than the Wild Goose Festival on August 8 to August 11. Held every summer in the picturesque Hot Springs, N.C., the festival is a community gathering at the intersection of social justice, spirituality and music. And the Human Rights Campaign Foundation will be there.
 
Our Religion and Faith Program will host diverse religious leaders from the South for a conversation tackling our great losses and great victories of 2013 – from the gutting of key civil rights law to the overturn of section 3 of DOMA.
 
The panel will feature:

• Rev. T. Anthony Spearman, Senior Pastor of the Clinton Tabernacle African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Hickory, N,C, and 3rd Vice President of the North Carolina NAACP;
• Bishop Tonyia Rawls, the founding Pastor of Unity Fellowship Church Charlotte and the Founder and Executive of the Freedom Center for Social Justice; and
• Caitlin Breedlove, the Co-Director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG) — a Southern regional LGBTQ organization working to build community across racial, class, cultural, gender and sexuality divides.

I’m honored to be moderating such an incredible group of North Carolinian religious leaders, living out Bayard Rustin’s words that still ring true today: We are all one.
 
Grounded in their faith and their lives in the South, these leaders are working with a new boldness and sense of purpose bringing forth an environment in which all of us can live freely and openly -- no matter where we live, how much money we make, who we love, or how we identify.
 
Interested in joining us? Festival registration is still open. Then head down to the Wild Goose Festival venue, The Space, on Friday, on August 9 at 3 p.m.
 
In addition to hosting the panel, the Religion and Faith Program will also be joined by the Youth and Campus Engagement Program, represented by Candace Gingrich-Jones. Also, be sure stop by our booth while you’re at the festival. Hope to see you there!