Rev. Bill Sinkford, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), and Rev. John H. Thomas, the president of the United Church of Christ (UCC), will be headed to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on October 10. They’ll be visiting the offices of elected representatives to deliver the message that religious liberals want to end the war in Iraq. Continue reading
Category Archives: Justice and peace
September 20 in Jena, Louisiana
Meg Riley, Board President for Faith in Public Life and Director of Advocacy and Witness at the Unitarian Universalist Association, was in Jena, Louisiana, on Thursday for the big demonstration in support of the Jena Six. A letter from Riley describing the demonstration is on the Faith in Public Life blog here.
Riley brought her eleven year old daughter, which sounds like some of the best religious education you could give.
Peace witness by phone
My father’s cousin Jack’s wife Abbie grew up a Quaker, and while she currently belongs to a Presbyterian church, she maintains her Quaker peace witness. She tells me via email that an organization called Democracy Rising is planning a nation-wide effort to contact Congressional representatives via telephone tomorrow, Thursday, September 6, to call for an end to the war in Iraq.
If you’d like to participate in the peace witness, the phone number at the Capitol Hill switchboard is 202-224-3121. If you’re not sure who represents you in Congress, you can find out here.
If you’re wondering exactly what to say when some low-level aide in your elected representative’s office answers your call, you could say: “As a voter, I want you to act now to end the war and occupation of Iraq. The Congress has the Constitutional right and a moral responsibility to use the power of the purse to withdraw all U.S. soldiers and contractors from Iraq on a responsibile and binding schedule.”
Democracy Rising offers the following background:
In September, Congress will focus on the war in Iraq. They will vote on the President’s request for continued funding of the war. At this writing, the request stands at $142 billion, but President Bush will probably ask for an additional $50 billion, for a total of more than $190 billion dollars!
Congress is not required to give President Bush any of this money, or even to bring the request to a vote. Congress can also put restrictions, firm withdrawal timelines and other conditions on any funding in order to force an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
To read even more, visit the Democracy Rising Web site.
Many Middle Passages
Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif., 2007) takes some of its inspiration from the 2000 Beacon Press book Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which argued in part that the Atlantic slave trade could be used as a way to understand other slave trades. The editors of Many Middle Passages felt that the Atlantic slave trade’s infamous middle passage — the disorientation, the violence, the occasional resistance — could help us understand other slave trades, in other parts of the world and in other eras. Eleven independent essays explore this idea further.
In “The Other Middle Passage: The African Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean,” Edward A. Alpers sheds some light on the lesser-known slave trade on the other side of the African continent. Alpers raises the obvious point that “it is a mistake to restrict analyses of the middle passage only to oceanic passages, assuming that enslaved Africans embarked from the African coast as if they were leaving their native country, when in fact their passage from freedom into slavery actually began with the moment they were swept up by the economic forces that drove the slave trade deep into the African interior.” [p. 21] Based on this assumption, Alpers traces the Indian Ocean slave trade into the interior of Africa. Relying primarily on freed-slave narratives, Alpers presents us with the horrors of the slave trade on land and by sea. The ocean passages were as horrible on the Indian Ocean as they were on the Atlantic Ocean, with the same high mortality rates and the same dehumanizing conditions. The commodification of human beings seems to take similar forms no matter where it springs up.
In “‘The Slave Trade Is Merciful Compared to This’: Slave Traders, Convict Transportation, and the Abolitionists,” Emma Christopher examines how England transported the earliest convicts to Australia. Some captains of the early ships that carried convicts to the penal colony in Australia had been slave traders previously. As slave traders, they had some financial incentive to keep as many slaves alive as possible. On the trip to Australia, however, there was no financial incentive to keep the convicts alive: “the captains could actually gain financially from the death of the convicts, as the food of the deceased was saved and could be sold once the ship reached its destination.” [p. 110]
Emma Christopher quotes from a letter sent to England by a soldier stationed in Australia at the time who said, “the slave trade is merciful compared to what I have seen in this fleet.” She then goes on to point out that whereas the incredible suffering on slave traders resulted from the commoditization of human beings, the absence of financial incentives helped create the incredible suffering on the convict transports: “Inured to the kind of cruelty that pervaded the trade in slaves, and with no financial incentive to check their behavior, [the ship’s officers] cared little for their charges.” [p. 122] Once back in England, the ship’s officers were tried and quickly acquitted, yet pressure from abolitionists and others forced the government to make sure the convicts were treated better thereafter. The real point, left unspoken, is that it would have been better if we hadn’t commodified human beings to begin with.
In “La Traite des Jaunes: Trafficking in Women and Children across the China Sea,” Julia Martinez studies the trade in sex slaves in and around the China Sea. This slave trade came to prominence in the late 19th C., peaked in the first half of the 20th C., and continues today. Many of the victims of this trade were children — some from destitute families who may even have sold their children out of desperation, but some kidnapped from prosperous families. The children sere sold as young as eight years old, and girls would be forced into selling sex at about age thirteen; they might be released from “debt bondage” at age eighteen [p. 214]; it is horrible to think that children treated as commodities, not as human beings, even if they were eventually released from bondage.
The China Sea sex slave trade was partially repressed through the middle 20th C., but there was a resurgence in the 1980’s as the times brought increased prosperity to the region. The sex slave trade continues today throughout the region. The final chapter of the book, titled “Afterword: ‘All of It Is Now'”, points out that more people are enslaved today (27 million) than at any previous point in history. The good news is that a smaller percentage of the world’s population is enslaved now than in earlier centuries, and that slavery is now illegal everywhere. But still — there are 27 million people enslaved even as I write this.
I was expecting this to be the usual boring academic book, but it wasn’t. Not all of the eleven essays were as powerful as the ones I have discussed, but all the essays are worth reading. The subject matter is so shocking and fascinating (in a horrible kind of way) that it overcomes even the occasional turgid academic prose. And the book is particularly compelling because several of the writers go out of the way to provide lengthy excerpts from first-person freed-slave narratives, so we get to hear the voices of slaves firsthand — at least, we get to hear the voices of those lucky slaves who somehow made it to freedom.
Disruptive
At last night’s meeting of the church’s board, Bill asked if any of us could help out in the soup kitchen the next morning (which is to say, this morning). First Unitarian sends a crew to make lunch on the third Wednesday of every month, but two of the five regulars were away on vacation, another two were down with some kind of virus, and one of the two replacements Bill had recruited to fill in had called to say she was sick.
Of course, most of the people at the Board meeting either had to go to work, or had already made other plans. But Maggi said she’d come right at nine to prepare food. I said I’d show up at nine thirty to help out, and I called Carol to see if she would be free — she was, and Bill had most of his crew.
This to me is one of the signs of a healthy congregation:– when something goes wrong, and you need volunteers at the last minute, enough people step forward to take care of whatever commitment needs to be taken care of. I don’t base this on any grand theory; all I know is that when this happens, the church feels like a real community to me.
By the time Carol and I showed up at nine-thirty, Bill, Maggi, and Maryellen (who had felt better and showed up to work) had already made most of the sandwiches and made up the desserts. Bill said Maggi and Maryellen couldn’t stay to serve the food, so Carol and I slipped home and worked for a couple of hours (fortunately, we both had flexible schedules today), and went back at eleven thirty to help serve lunch. There were a lot of people to serve. Bill said they usually serve 150 people on the third Wednesday, but today we served about 190, including some families with children. By noon, Bill was madly making more sandwiches while Carol and I served people. Finally, we ran out of sandwich meat and had to serve bread and butter. At least it was something to eat.
My carefully planned work schedule for today was completely disrupted. But sometimes volunteer work really is more important than anything else.
Sweatshop-free dress shirts
All of a sudden, my dress shirts are wearing out. I bought these shirts six or seven years ago from Land’s End, so I automatically went back to Land’s End and looked at their Web site. The same shirt costs the same as it did six or seven eyars ago, about US$25. In fact, I remember that same shirt costing about $25 twenty years ago. According to The Inflation Calculator, “What cost $25 in 1987 would cost $44.31 in 2006.” That suggests to me that these days, these shirts are now made overseas by workers who earn just a pittance for their work.
My conscience held me back from ordering shirts from Land’s End. I did a Web search for “union made shirts.”
And I happened to find Justice Clothing, which supplies union-made clothing as “the sweatshop-free alternative.” They carry two lines of dress shirts. They carry Kenneth Gordon shirts, based in New Orleans, with a nice button-down shirt selling for US$56.25 each if you buy two or more — unfortunately there was nothing in my sleeve length. Fortunately, Justice Clothing also carry shirts by Forsyth of Canada, who make a line of tall sizes — blended fabric button-down shirts for US$40 each, and 100% cotton straight collar shirts for US$53 each (for two or more).
Just thought someone else out there might like to know.
The loss of a good blog
Over the past six months, one of the best religious blogs out there has been Speaking Truth to Power. Written by the pseudononymous uugrrl, it chronicles her thoughts and feelings as someone who was a victim of clergy sexual misconduct. But now she has announced that she’ll be taking the blog down for personal reasons. You have a few more days to read her well-written posts on clergy sexual misconduct.
I’m going to miss uugrrl. In the past, I’ve been in churches that had suffered from clergy sexual misconduct. I discovered that clergy misconduct can poison an entire congregation for years — and I learned that misconduct can have a negative impact on everyone in that congregation. Reading uugrrl’s blog has helped me to come to a better understanding of the evil of clergy sexual misconduct.
I’ll leave you with some critically important advice uugrrl offers to anyone who is a victim of clergy sexual misconduct in a Unitarian Universalist congregation (or in almost any denomination, for that matter):
If you are a victim of UU clergy misconduct, don’t report it…. To be clear, by “don’t report it,†I mostly mean don’t file a formal complaint. I don’t mean you shouldn’t tell anyone. It’s even okay in my opinion to tell the UUA [denominational headquarters], as long as you make it clear they do not have your permission to share your name or to consider you a complainant. Just do what feels safest. And be very careful. One good option is contacting Marie Fortune’s Institute.
A rockin book of poems
My favorite living Unitarian Universalist poet is Everett Hoagland. Everett’s poetry was featured in our denominational magazine in the March/April, 2000, and Spring, 2004 (with interview), issues. His poems have been published in magazines ranging from poetry journals like The American Poetry Review and The Iowa Review, to the general interest magazine Essence, to political publications like The Progressive and People’s Weekly World. Everett also does worship services based on his poetry.
Everett has just published a new book of poetry, and he’s donating all proceeds from its sale to Treatment on Demand, a non-profit here in New Bedford that does fantastic work in the areas of HIV/AIDS and substance abuse. So for ten bucks, you can get a rockin book of poetry, perfect for reading out loud, poems that will in turn make your blood boil and serve as a balm for your soul in these crazed times of war and injustice.
Keep reading for Everett’s words on where the money is going, and how to order this book. (Hey, why not buy an extra copy of this book for your church’s youth group.) Continue reading
Family values in the workplace
Last Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine contains an article by Eyal Press which explores the emerging legal issue of how and when an employer can fire an employee for taking family leave, either for the employee’s health concerns or because the employee is acting as a caregiver for a family member.
The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act supposedly guarantees unpaid leave to employees with such serious health problems. But the law doesn’t cover employers with fewer than 50 people (which includes most churches), and it doesn’t cover caregivers.
On the other hand, an increasing number of former employees have successfully sued their employers after being terminated during unpaid medical leave. One scholar, Joan C. Williams, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, argues in her book Unbending Gender that offering unpaid leave is a feminist issue. The article by Press summarizes her argument:
Williams argued that the growing tension between work and family was not simply a product of economic necessity. It stemmed, rather, from a marketplace structured around an increasingly outdated masculine norm: the “ideal worker” who can work full time for an entire career while enjoying “immunity from family work.” At a time when both adults in most families had come to participate in the labor force, Williams argued that this standard was unrealistic, especially for women, who remained the primary caregivers in most households.
I would argue that most Unitarian Universalist congregations structure their ministry positions around this “increasingly outdated masculine norm” of the worker who can “work full time… while enjoying ‘immunity from family work’.” On a practical level, many (most?) congregations expect their ministers to work fifty to sixty hours a week (while being paid for forty hours), presumably under the unspoken assumption that if the minister has children, there will be another spouse to take care of them. On the legal level, often this outdated masculine norm is implicit in the contracts signed by ministers. By contrast, Directors of Religious Education often find themselves with flexible jobs that allow lots of freedom for caring for children — not surprising, since religious education is still seen as “women’s work.”
It would be an interesting exercise to examine one’s own congregation for this outdated masculine norm. What if the sexton needs family leave — will it be available? Are flextime and flexi-place available to every employee whenever possible? What sort of norms do employee contracts embody? Do all employees have access to unpaid medical leave? In a denomination where the feminist revolution still isn’t finished, I suspect this is now one of our most important feminist battlefields.