Organizational wolves in sheep's clothing

Beware of euphemistic organizations.  These are groups named one thing, but usually geared toward something else.  So the Southern Poverty Law Center sounds like it must be some legal group that helps people who are poor fight the man.  Perhaps in its day.  Now it's more or less a group of individuals behind pushing a leftist agenda.  Or Americans United for Separation of Church and State.  Not really.  Multiple interviews with the group's leader, Barry Lynn, make it clear that it is a radical left group aimed at manipulating the law in order to banish into the outer darkness all ideals, including religious beliefs, that fail to embrace leftist goodthink.

And, of course, it's not confined to left leaning organizations.  The Media Research Center sounds like a think tank geared toward studying, and even monitoring, journalism.  No problem with that.  The press could use a few watchdogs.  But after visiting their site and listening to their president, Brent Bozelle, you begin to get the sneaky feeling that the Research is focused more on the left leaning media than such conservative outlets as FOX News.

Unfortunately, the same is true in the world of religion.  Catholics for Equality sounds darn nice.  On the surface, who is against equality?  Until you look at them and see what they are about.  They  merely are a left leaning gay rights organization that embraced the Sitz im Leben of our disastrous modern doctrines of sexuality, and expects the Catholic Church to chuck 2000 years of Christian teaching in order to join them. 

There's a deliberate dishonesty in many such names.  They strut like peacocks under the banner of labels that invoke the highest principles: equality, religious freedom, accountability and knowledge, protection and advocacy for the poor.  And yet this is an illusion, a well orchestrated illusion.  One of my biggest beefs with the growing trend of Protestant, particularly Evangelical, churches to hide their denominational and doctrinal identity by such names as 'Happy Creek Community Church' or 'Super Congregation Spiritual Harvest', was the understated deception behind it.  Sort of putting on a false face on your first date in the hopes of duping the other person.

So it pays to be careful when the title of some important organization runs along the bottom of the television screen.  What appears to be a great group of people objectively founded on the most universally accepted morals and values may turn out to be a partisan organization whose first act was to hide behind a deceptively vague or misleading title in order to advance an agenda you might not want.