As gay families rolled Easter Eggs at the White House last month, conservative activists took to the airwaves to denounce the effort as politicizing a children’s event.

One group that took the lead in criticizing the presence of gay and lesbian parents and their children at the event was the Institute on Religion & Democracy, a Washington, D.C. based group “reforming the social and political witness of American churches, while promoting democracy and religious freedom at home and abroad,” according to its website.

Some gay-friendly Christian groups are fighting back at what they see as IRD’s divisive strategies and increasing preoccupation with gay rights issues.

“There is a growing awareness that IRD and groups affiliated with them have been having an increasingly disruptive effect on our churches,” said John H. Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ. “In some cases, groups that have affinity with IRD provide instruction to churches seeking to leave the United Council of Churches.”

When IRD was formed in 1981, its attention was focused on the Cold War and opposition to the National Council of Church’s protests against U.S. policies in Central America.

Following the end of the Cold War in the mid 1990s, IRD’s literature switched its focus to the “culture wars” and the place of women in the church.

The IRD criticized a 1995 Platform for Action presentation at the World Conference on Women in China that demanded equality for women in political and economic life.

In a fundraising letter dated Oct. 7, 1996, IRD’s past president Diane Knippers wrote: “Some radical feminists are rejecting traditional Christianity for experimentation with forms of paganism. Lesbian advocacy. Witchcraft. Worship of earth goddesses.”

In addition to slamming gay and lesbian parents and their children for participating in the White House Easter Egg Roll in April, IRD applauded a United Methodist Church Judicial Council decision to stick by its ruling in favor of a Virginia pastor who refused to grant church membership to a gay congregant.

Mark Tooley, director of IRD’s United Methodist program, said IRD simply seeks to “reform and reinvigorate [the church] before it declines further.”

IRD has several different church initiatives, including United Methodist Action, Presbyterian Action and Episcopal Action.

“One must distinguish between critics in the life of the church who love the church and want to be part of the vibrant dialogue and another category of critic who disrupts, co-opts, destroys the church for narrow ideological purposes,” UCC’s Thomas said.

IRD is “a full-time agency devoted to neutralizing and dismembering the mainstream church in the U.S.,” he said.

Most church leaders refuse to recognize the organization’s potential impact, said Frederick Clarkson, president of Talk to Action, a website about evangelical conservatives.

“The story that the press has been missing that needs to be better told is that these churches are under sustained, deliberate attack for two decades for purposes of neutralization, dismembering them as central institutions for vicious partisan political reasons,” said Clarkson.

Church leaders must abandon their naiveté and recognize the breadth of IRD’s influence in politics and the press, said Andrew Weaver, a United Methodist minister. Weaver said he has nicknamed IRD the “Institute of Sex and More Sex” because of the group’s preoccupation with homosexuality.

“The bigotry they have pumped in about gays and lesbians is creating a cancer in the religious body,” said Weaver.