Quoting from the article above:

"[Former Yosemite Superintendent] Finley explains . . . 'You can’t roller-skate in the Sistine Chapel, nor should you.' Which is to say that adventure sports are banned in parks for cultural reasons."

So, if we're running a museum curatorship and religious-worship service that happens to utilize outdoor locations, I see no reason why the history of gays and lesbians should be excluded.

Wow. If this then that, to absudum.

Museum curation is one of several different disciplines within the NPS. It is far from the best funded, as much of it is behind the scenes and not as sexy as Old Faithful or Half Dome or the grizzlies in Denali.

If we are preserving and communicating the history of America then there is no reason to exclude the history of sexual minorities. It won't take one single bit of bikeable trail away from you. There is every probability that a goodly proportion of your bike riding buddies are within the GLBTQRSVP community anyhow.

Rick, you are scoring an own goal. I am saying, just as you are, that as long as there's a museum aspect to the NPS, "I see no reason why the history of gays and lesbians should be excluded." I have to quote myself because you can't possibly have read my post. And yes, I do have one FB friend who's a gay man and is a mountain biker. What I am also saying is that this issue brings into relief the larger problem that that's pretty what the NPS is: a museum service, combined with a religious movement. I believe that is not good. There I am sure we will disagree, if not on the facts, at least on the consequences of them.

Fine, fine. I just don't know how you leap from my "there is a museum aspect to the NPS" to your "NPS is a museum service". [emphasis added] I'm totally leaving alone your religious allusions.

Fair enough! I think our difference of opinion is that I think the NPS would like to treat all of its properties as museums and that's why it's huffy (no pun intended) about mountain bikers, kayakers, climbers, etc. Its preferred forms of recreation are contemplative and, one senses, ideally should be reverential . . . exhilaration has no place in its catalogue raisonné of permissible uses.

The article—which I encourage everyone to read—points out that the NPS has been thwarted in this desire, but not in a way that's good:

n 1957, Congress approved Mission 66, an unprecedented ten-year, $700 million series of construction projects intended to improve infrastructure by building thousands of miles of roads, visitor centers, campgrounds, bathrooms, gift shops, and maintenance bays. The parks as we now know them are a reflection of this single act. In his 2007 book, Mission 66, Ethan Carr, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, writes that the act “came to symbolize … a willingness to sacrifice the integrity of park ecosystems for the sake of enhancing the merely superficial scenery by crowds of people in automobiles.”

The gravamen (crux) of the article is this well-argued paragraph, which sums up a number of issues some of us have been raising in these discussions for a long time:

What all this has left us with is phenomenal natural areas that are for the most part managed like drive-through museums. Meanwhile, a growing number of outdoor athletes, who should be among the most committed park stewards, have been ostracized. The nonprofit Outdoor Alliance, a Washington, D.C., umbrella group for human-powered-advocacy organizations like American Whitewater, climbing’s Access Fund, and the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA), has 100,000 members and skews toward a Gen Y demographic. By comparison, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), the historical champion of the national parks, has 500,000 members with a median age in the sixties.

And I can certainly see how Grayson Schaeffer's opinion speaks to you. He is championing your favorite thingie.

By way of full disclosure,  by the way, my wife is a museum curator working full time for the NPS. Since I'm retired and have nothing better to do than battle back at windmills, I kinda stick up for her career field when museums are bad mouthed.

Back to the topic of the thread, I've never seen an organization as diverse as the NPS, and I have no doubts that this mission to include sexual minorities in amongst the rest of the civil rights history the NPS preserves will be accomplished well.

12 billion dollar maintence backlog and this is thier new priority. This effort is fine with me as long as not one cent of NPS budget is spent on this. Maybe REI can fund it, Sally.