UU World magazine will be doing online coverage of the 2010 General Assembly (GA) of the Unitarian Universalist Association on their General Assembly blog. Yesterday’s post provides convenient links to video streaming.

So far, I am not clear which bloggers will be blogging GA — if you know of someone blogging GA, please leave a link in the comments. With luck, bloggers will tag their GA posts — as a suggestion, the tag “uuaga10” would be consistent with past GA blogging tags.

Update: Bloggers who tag with “uuaga10” will be aggregated on the UUpdates Web site at the following URL:
http://uupdates.net/index.php?main=tags&tag=uuaga10

Chris Walton points out the Twitter users are using the hashtag “#uuaga” and you can follow those tweets at the following URL:
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23uuaga

Kinsi is blogging frequently at Spirituality and Sunflowers, and his well-written personal coverage helps round out the reporting at UU World.

Peter Morales, the president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), has proposed another option for the 2012 General Assembly (GA) of the Association. As various organizations organize to boycott Arizona over the enactment of SB 1070, delegates to this year’s General Assembly will be voting on whether to move the 2012 GA away from Phoenix in order to participate in the boycott. Morales has been in communication with Puente and the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON), two organizations that organized the protests in Arizona over Memorial Day weekend, and “we have received an invitation from Puente and NDLON to partner with them and to make our General Assembly in 2012 something far more than a normal GA.” Pablo Alvarado, director of NDLON, and Salvador Reza of Puente, sent a letter to Morales which said in part:

There will still be much to witness about in 2012. While SB1070 may be overturned by then, we anticipate that there will still be a terrible situation to deal with here in Arizona. The Ethnic Studies legislation that was recently passed needs to be overturned and there is currently proposed legislation that would mandate that children born in the U.S. of undocumented parents not be accepted as citizens. Meanwhile Sheriff Joe Arpaio and others will continue to deputize volunteers eager to enforce immigration law and terrorize our community. We need the faith community here to stand in solidarity with our movement and to galvanize others to condemn this growing human rights crisis and create a climate that welcomes and supports migratory families.

We ask that your 2012 General Assembly here in Phoenix be a convergence in cooperation with us and that together we design the best ways that UUs can witness, learn from, take action, and serve the movement here….

I have to say, I think this is an invitation we should accept. Not that you should listen to my opinion, which is fairly useless. Instead, you can read Morales’s complete statement here.

There’s a new article up on uuworld.org titled “Big Changes Proposed for General Assembly.” General Assembly is the annual gathering of U.S. Unitarian Universalists, ostensibly held to transact the business of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). In October the UUA Board of Trustees commissioned a report to study whether General Assembly actually provides the setting for democratic decision-making it is supposed to provide. The short answer from the report: “GA is not really democratic,” and in fact provides “faux democracy and unaccountable representation.”

The UUA Board of Trustees will hear and discuss this report at its current meeting, which begins today and runs through Sunday. Will the Board of Trustees act on this report? If they don’t, I hope former UUA Moderator Denny Davidoff carries out a threat she made at the 2009 General Assembly, when she said, “We should get serious about governing ourselves democratically, or I will move in 2010 that we rescind the fifth principle [of the principles and purpose of the UUA Bylaws, calling for democratic process] until we can prove we are democratically represented.”

In the mean time, the 2010 General Assembly Committee has scheduled only business meetings on Saturday and Sunday of this year’s General Assembly. No doubt this will annoy some who see General Assembly as one big social event, but perhaps it will keep the focus of General Assembly where it should be, to wit, on doing the business of the UUA.