North Carolina and the Gay-Rights Backlash

Last December, the Empire State Pride Agenda, New York's leading L.G.B.T.-rights organization, did something almost unheard of. After twenty-five years of work, it declared victory and closed. "We ran out of causes, and donors," one of its leaders recently told me. But not everyone in the gay-rights community saw things that way. At about the same time that the Pride Agenda decided to cease operations, Kate Kendell, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told Time, "We...