women

Truth and Meaning: Extremism

/ uurevjeff / 1 Comment

One of the reasons I write this blog is to speak to the masses of you out there who consider yourselves “middle of the road.” Maybe you are a Republican, a Democrat, or even an Independent. Maybe you are a Methodist, a Catholic or an atheist. You read my blog because it speaks with a progressive voice. You would never post a comment, because you are not involved … yet.

But the time is coming when lurkers and bystanders are going to have to take a position. Extremely wealthy people are buying our government. Extremist conservatives have hijacked the Republican Party, making Ronald Reagan look like a moderate — and Dwight Eisenhower a positive liberal. On matters of public policy, the middle ground is shrinking. Debates today tend to be black or white, all or nothing, and compromise is disappearing from our public dialogue.

For years, we put up with the Westboro Baptist Church and their outrageous offenses. Few Christians publicly condemned their acts of hate, their complete misrepresentation of the message of love taught by Jesus. Every statistic shows that our national worship of guns leads to more killing than anywhere else in the world. And yet, the voice of the NRA goes largely unopposed except for small groups with little backing from the church. The only time the church got largely involved in Michigan was when a bill threatened to allow open carry spaces to include churches.

And now, an anti-abortionist group has invaded the sanctuary of a church in New Orleans, disrupting the worship service during a moment of silence honoring a recently deceased member. Fortunately, we Unitarian Universalists practice what we preach, so the protesters were escorted out of the church by trained peacekeepers as the congregation sang to overwhelm their shouts of hate.

When will it end? How far down the path of extremism must we go before you get involved? How would you feel if people violated your sacred, holy space, calling you names and damning you? In the 1960s, we called this the Silent Majority. Well, the time for silence is over and reasonable people must begin to reclaim the moral center of this nation.

Extremism is the weapon of the ignorant, of the bully. Extremism is immoral and silence only fuels its flame. It is time to get off the sidelines and let your voice be heard. It is time for true people of faith and love to stand up to the extremists and say, “Enough!”

Truth and Meaning: Pro-Life

/ uurevjeff
I am pro-life. But as another election cycle approaches, you will hear this phrase bandied loosely about by politicians courting your votes. So I want to be absolutely clear what I mean when I say that I am pro-life. I mean that:
  • I am a pacifist and oppose all war or violent military intervention as a solution to any problem. War inevitably leads to senseless death and destruction; war most often creates more problems than it solves; and war always gives birth to yet another generation who view violence as a means to their ends.
  • I believe that no government has the right to murder anyone, regardless of the crime they have committed. Human judgments are fallible, and one mistaken execution is one too many. Also, we do not possess god-like prescience to know that even the most hardened criminal cannot be rehabilitated, or that the most mentally-disturbed person cannot be cured.
  • We possess more than enough resources to feed, clothe and shelter every living person. No one on the face of this planet should ever go hungry, naked or homeless. And that means that sharing wealth must take precedence over protecting privilege.
  • Liberty and the pursuit of happiness are impossible without life. And while some disease and certainly death is inevitable, far too much medical and mental suffering is not. No one should ever lack of medical treatment because of something as ridiculous as placing a higher priority on stock dividends or tax cuts for our wealthiest citizens.
  • A woman’s body is her sacred gift and she deserves the right to have complete control of when and how many children she wishes to bear. And it violates our Constitutionally-guaranteed right of religious freedom when politicians place continuation of a nonviable fetus above that of a healthy mother.
  • “Rape culture” is a real and vulgar part of American society. No woman should ever fear for her safety because of her appearance, her actions or the puerile desire of a man to steal her most intimate dignity.
  • Our obscene obsession with gun ownership and gun purchase in this nation is an egregious offense to all life.
Here are the attitudes I consider to be “anti-life:”
  • If you believe that any nation has the right to murder those of another without exhausting every conceivable diplomatic option and every nonviolent course of action, then you are not pro-life. And if you send men and women into combat and then fail to provide them world-class mental and physical medical treatment, then you are not pro-life.
  • If you believe that the state has the right to murder prisoners convicted of crimes, given the inordinate number of mistakes that have been made in capital punishment sentencing, its inherent racism and classism, and the cruel processes used to take those lives, then you are not pro-life.
  • If you support funding cuts to food stamps, school lunch programs, early childhood education initiatives and public education of equally high quality for all, when more than enough is available in our bloated military spending to meet these needs and more, then you are not pro-life.
  • If you oppose the Affordable Care Act, but offer no viable solution to providing health insurance to every American, then you are not pro-life.
  • When you support the most intrusive invasion of a woman’s body, but offer our young people little realistic education about sex and obstruct their access to birth control, then you are not pro-life. And if you seek to deny victims of incest, rape and medical complications threatening the life of the mother with means to terminate those pregnancies, then you are not pro-life.
  • If you support “slap on the wrist” punishments for rapists and those committing domestic violence and sexual assaults on women, and excuse the behavior of beasts for violating a woman by blaming her for the crime, then you are not pro-life.
  • If you are not repulsed that this nation has done absolutely nothing to create mandatory background checks for all gun purchases, or to limit access to weapons whose sole purpose is the mass murder of humans — and you have not pressured you legislators to do so — then you are not pro-life.
So, when that politician knocks on your door and tells you he is “pro-life,” challenge him with these points as well. Because loving the unborn fetus without caring about its life after birth, the families that will raise it or the society that supports its successful development is not pro-life.

Truth and Meaning: Hate

/ uurevjeff

Emotions are the expressed transfer of living energy. When we feel, when we reside within an emotion, we emit a certain energy that others around us can sense. Children are the most transparent when radiating emotion. We easily sense when a child is joyful, confused, scared or frustrated.

As we grow older, we learn complicated emotional combinations and filters designed to hide our true emotions. The choreography of emotional exchange becomes a ballet of exquisite skill and complexity that opens the door to different kinds of feelings. But this dance also complicates our routines. As we see often in football, sometimes the “receiver” runs a different route than expected by the quarterback, and the passage of emotions fall incomplete to the ground.

As carriers of energy, emotions share many characteristics with living creatures. Some emotions hearken back to a more primitive state of reptilian instinct. Other, more mature emotions evoke feelings of family and tribal group. And some emotions combine with others in a symbiotic melding — a beautiful waltz of grace made possible by the willingness of those sharing the emotion to bare themselves, to make themselves fully vulnerable.

But there is a special class of emotions that share the attributes of a lesser life form — the parasite. These emotions wither and die without the energy stolen from other life forms. Hate is a parasite emotion. For hate only thrives by stealing vibrant life energy from others. Hate leeches the aerated blood of society, leaving only disease and weakness in its wake.

When someone expresses hate, the recipient naturally feels fear and anxiety in response. The recipient might naturally feel compelled to expend energy fending off the hate, and this only feeds the parasite. In this way, the hate-filled person poisons others and like a vampire drains the essence of life energy from a community.

But there is a cure for the parasite of hate. The medicine that repels the symptoms of hate is Love. For Love acts not only as a barrier to the viral attack of hate, Love offers a positive expression of emotion that not only makes the object of hate feel better, but also treats the root causes of hate. For in the end, the only difference between a parasite and a symbiote is cooperation. A parasite gives nothing and simply wallows in its own selfish desires. The symbiote returns gift for gift, bringing positive contributions to the living equation.

So when the parasite seeks to infect you with hate, do not feed its emptiness with fear or anger. Instead, inoculate yourself with the energy of Love. In this way, you also may help transform the useless parasite into a creature with contributions and, in time, its own Love to share.

Truth and Meaning: Mythic Struggles

/ uurevjeff

Every religion has its mythic stories. We teach our children in Sunday School classes and we share them during worship services. Our stories inspire us to want to act, and instruct us on how to act.

The mythic stories of my religion involve resistance. But our resistance has not been against tyrants or kings, but against ideas and prevailing social norms. Katarzyna Weigel and Michael Servetus were burned at the stake resisting the idea that every person had to believe what the majority of people believed. When Edward Everett Hale and Lydia Maria Child helped lead the abolition movement, they resisted the dominant paradigm that accepted that some persons can be treated as property. And when Viola Liuzzo and James Reeb died at the hands of racist cowards in Alabama, they resisted the notion that all people do not have the same inherent rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Some generations don’t have the chance to write a mythic story. The great causes arrive only occasionally, and are often not recognized until they are past. But I believe that we are living through such a period right now — a period in which a shadow hovers over the land and whose minions march on many fronts. That shadow is Regressivism. That shadow is the delusion held by some that we need to return to a time that never actually existed — a time during which the masses lived contentedly under the thumb of a benevolent and privileged few.

The Regressive is a cunning adversary. He poses as the polite academician, the well-groomed politician, the business owner from humble roots, the preacher of a loving god. The Regressive promises freedom from fear, freedom from government interference, freedom from immorality. And you pay for these freedoms with sacrifices to the altar of gods of Regressivism. The price? Sacrifice the Other. Sacrifice LGBT folk because they are abominations. Sacrifice women because they cannot be trusted with the responsibility of reproductive choice. Sacrifice the poor because their labor has no value. Sacrifice people of color because they are inherently inferior. Sacrifice your safety because guns matter more than people. Sacrifice the sick, the elderly, the mentally ill, the homeless, the immigrant, and the poor because they are not worthy.

And who resides in this godhead of Regressivism? Greed. Ignorance. Complacency. Power. Lust. Hate. Arrogance. Intolerance. These modern day golden calves demand sacrifices of blood and life and will settle for nothing less. And in return, they offer the banality of cable television, Twitter triviality, and the narcissism of a bloated America that wallows in wealth while half of the world starves.

But how can we fight these gods, whose resources to oppress us seem endless? We start locally and we start small. Throughout Michigan, towns are passing ordinances to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in nondiscrimination laws. Bay County adopted one small piece and Saginaw continues to wrestle with a much broader ordinance. Each time we take up this struggle, the shadow of Regressivism sends forth its soldiers armed with bigotry, a strategy of misinformation and the tactics of fear. The time is coming for Midland to enter the fray. The forces arrayed against us here will be strong, but we will prevail — we must prevail.

Truth and Meaning: Women and Dignity

/ uurevjeff

Our society treats women as second class citizens. Objectification in the media constantly barrages us with the message that women are primarily sexual objects. Our failure to prevent sexual assault, domestic violence, rape and trafficking of women is a stain of deep shame on this nation. Advocates of smaller government will stop at nothing to insert their laws deep into the most intimate parts of women’s bodies, while at the same time derailing every attempt to provide those same women with adequate health care.

On Tuesday, April 29, advocates for women will gather in Lansing in recognition of Michigan Equal Pay Day. Equal Pay Day marks how far into the year a woman must work, on average, to earn as much as a man earned the previous year. Because women earn less than men, they must work longer for the same amount of pay. The latest national data indicate women’s median annual earnings for full-time work was 77 cents for every dollar men made (Michigan has the seventh widest gap at 74 cents to the dollar).

http://www.freep.com/article/20140409/BUSINESS06/304090026/equal-pay-women-salary-wages

Women, on average, earn less than men in virtually every occupation and this is true even in female-dominated occupations. Women of color face an even larger wage gap. As chronicled in the AAUW study “Graduating to a Pay Gap,” sex-based wage disparities start with a college-educated woman’s first job when compared to men with equivalent degrees. The gender wage gap not only continues during her career, but shows an increase over time.

The first two principles of Unitarian Universalism affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and justice, equity and compassion in human relations. Therefore, I believe that every person possesses equal worth and that I am called to advocate for just and loving treatment in order to guarantee every person’s dignity. So in America, where worth is typically determined by the marketplace, my religious beliefs state that a just and equitable society should pay women and men who perform the same jobs equally. Equal pay for me, therefore, is a religious principle.

But this issue extends far beyond a matter of merely how much less women earn less than men for the same work. This issue strikes at the core of the American family and the economic well being of our children. Today, one in three Americans live at or below the poverty line, and almost 70 percent are women and children. That means 42 million women in this nation of unprecedented bounty are barely surviving economically, and the number of working poor is steadily increasing. A new study, “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink,” illustrates many of the attributes of our unequal system of worth.

  • Women represent nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers, concentrated in jobs that tend to be labor-intensive.
  • Women also do most of the care work for children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women devote more than 110 million hours a year to unpaid interactive child care, more than double that of men.
  • According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, women over the age of 65 are twice as likely to live in poverty as men of the same age.

We know that these statistics hold true even here in Midland, where 53 percent of families with children under the age of 5 and headed by women are below the poverty level. For families headed by women with older children, 45 percent live in poverty.

So what can you do to advocate for dignity for women in the area of pay equity? Several bills to strengthen Michigan’s laws about pay equity are in Legislative Committees awaiting action:

  • SB 296/HB 4516 provides wage transparency for similarly situated employees
  • SB 297/HB 4519 increases penalties for wage discrimination based on gender
  • SB 298/HB 4519 strengthens the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act to make it clear that sex-based wage discrimination is illegal under Michigan law and incorporates the equal pay factors into the act
  • SB 299/HB 4517 establishes a pay equity study commission to examine the scope of the issue in Michigan and provide technical assistance to employers

Rep. Stamas and Sen. Moolenaar need to hear from people who support women’s dignity in the workplace and in our communities. And wear red on Equal Pay Day on April 29 to symbolize that women’s pay is “in the red” compared to men’s pay.

Truth and Meaning: Hypocrisy and Hobby Lobby

/ uurevjeff

Recently, the Supreme Court heard the case of a privately-owned corporation wishing to impose the religious views of its owners on its employees. On its surface, this case is about contraception and whether one believes in the morality of birth control. At the next level of understanding is the debate over whether “religious freedom” guarantees one the right to practice one’s religion when doing so imposes one’s own religious beliefs on others.

But, this case is not really about either of these important debates. The Hobby Lobby vs. Sebelius case is about hypocrisy — the hypocrisy running all too rampant in our society today.
The Green family sells products for a living. They pay employees a compensation package to work in their stores and sell their products. And the Greens want to control how those employees spend the money they earn because of the Greens’ so-called Christian values. But let’s examine how the Greens act upon their religious values.

  • Hobby Lobby imports billions of dollars of products from China, a nation that doesn’t allow its people to have the freedom to worship freely, where workers are routinely exposed to dangerous situations for low pay, and where persecution of Chinese Christians is increasing. And although the one-child policy was technically lifted, abandonment and selective killing of female babies continues. Forced abortion is still a regular practice in China. See http://www.usnews.com/opinion/leslie-marshall/2014/03/26/hobby-lobbys-china-hypocrisy
  • Documents filed with the Department of Labor three months after the Greens filed their lawsuit show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k), even though there exist several boutique mutual funds that specifically screen companies that are not in line with their client’s religious beliefs. See http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/hobby-lobby-retirement-plan-invested-emergency-contraception-and-abortion-drug-makers
  • The main drugs in question in the case brought before the Supreme Court are the emergency contraceptives Plan-B and Ella.One huge problem with this situation is that up until 2012, Hobby Lobby provided them as part of their insurance plan. Only when they realized that Obamacare was going to mandate this coverage did they suddenly become interested in not providing these drugs. See  http://www.reddirtreport.com/prairie-opinions/hobby-lobby-provided-emergency-contraceptives-they-opposed-them#sthash.uukZXFjI.dpuf
  • Hobby Lobby’s CFO Jon Cargill, and an affiliate company, Crafts Etc., are the two single biggest donors to the National Christian Foundation, an organization that backed groups advocating in favor of Arizona’s anti-gay bill — the Center for Arizona Policy and the Alliance Defending Freedom. This action displays not just a desire to engage in a religious practice, but a concerted effort to reach out and support overly discriminatory laws. See http://www.salon.com/2014/03/27/hobby_lobbys_secret_agenda_how_its_secretly_funding_a_vast_right_wing_movement/

So, in other words, when it increases their profits, the Greens readily set aside their vaunted Christian values in favor of the almighty dollar. The only religious value ultimately important to the Greens is the worship of wealth and the desire to impose their political views on others.

The Beloved Community: Justice

/ uurevjeff
As Jody and I drove the 750 miles from Midland, Michigan to Raleigh, North Carolina last Friday, we knew that we were engaged in a pilgrimage.  Just as those called to Selma in 1965, we were called to the South again to march for the moral rights of all people, of our society.
So, as we passed into each new state (and went from -7 degrees to 50 degrees!), we stopped to record a sermon for my congregation back home to watch on Sunday morning.  This is part of an ongoing sermon series I have been delivering this year on King’s idea of the Beloved Community — what are the attributes of the Beloved Community, and how can we get there.
https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/0p0YSTVzpKE&source=uds