Are some people now truly above the law, beholden to nothing and no one, free to ignore the law and without consequence?”

– Rep. Adam Schiff

This week’s featured post is “What Conservatives Tell Themselves About Critical Race Theory“.

This week everybody was talking about Build Back Better

The negotiations over Biden’s Build Back Better plan seem to be inching towards a finish line, though we won’t really know until there’s a complete agreement. It sounds like the top-line figure will be in the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion range, in addition to the $1-1.2 trillion in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. There are still probably a billion details to work out, but I think Democrats realize they can’t go into 2022 without more legislative accomplishments than they have now.

Once there’s an actual agreement, with a list of what’s in and what’s out, I’m going to try hard to look at it fresh, without comparing it to what I thought or hoped might be in it at some earlier stage. I think the right comparison is: What was I expecting on January 5, right after Ossoff and Warnock won the Georgia run-offs and gave Democrats their zero-vote majority?

The political style here is the opposite of what Obama did with the ACA. Then, Obama didn’t indulge much blank-slate dreaming. Single-payer was out from Day 1, and the variations of the bill debated were in a fairly narrow range. Biden has allowed a much wider range of visions to flourish, while knowing that most of them would fail to manifest. It’ll be interesting to see how those strategies contrast after Democrats have run the 2022 campaign.

and January 6

I was glad to see the House take the January 6 Committee’s job seriously and recommend Steve Bannon be prosecuted for blowing off a subpoena. The case is now in Merrick Garland’s in-box. Garland has to realize that if he doesn’t prosecute, congressional oversight of the executive branch is pretty much over.

On November 4, a federal court is due to consider Trump’s suit to stop the National Archives from turning documents from his administration over to the January 6 Committee. It’s not clear the judge’s ruling will even matter, since the point of the suit is to run the clock out.

John Eastman, the lawyer whose memo laid out the plan for Trump to overturn the 2020 election results, now claims the point of his plan was to stop Trump from doing something worse. Trump wanted Vice President Pence to simply declare him the winner on January 6. But under Eastman’s plan, Pence would give states with Republican legislatures more time to replace their Biden electors with Trump electors.

Either way, the point was for Trump to stay in power after losing the election. If Eastman’s plan had worked, American democracy would have ended by now.

and the pandemic

Cases per day in the US continue to drop at the rate of about 20-25% every two weeks, which works out to falling in half about every 5-6 weeks. The current daily average is 72,644, down 25% in the last two weeks. That’s about half what it was on September 18, five weeks and two days ago. Five weeks from now is just after Thanksgiving, which last year was the beginning of a holiday surge that continued through New Years.

The frustrating thing to me personally is that cases are falling just about everywhere but here in the Northeast. The region where I live had the lowest new-case rates in the country during the late-summer surge, but now our trends are flat while the rest of the country is improving to meet us.

The daily-new-cases-per-100K rate in my county (Middlesex, Massachusetts) has been stuck in the 14-18 range for months. Meanwhile, a county I watch because friends live there (Manatee, Florida) had bounced up over 120, but has now fallen below 10. I’m not wishing anything bad for the rest of America, I just want to share in the improvement.

The Atlantic published a disturbing article written by James Heathers, a “forensic peer reviewer” of scientific research. He’s begins by talking about ivermectin as a Covid treatment (which it isn’t), and finds that the problem isn’t entirely with YouTube videos and gullible retweeters: Enough published scientific studies said positive things about ivermectin that

it might seem perfectly rational to join the fervent supporters of ivermectin. It might even strike you as reasonable to suggest, as one physician and congressional witness did recently, that “people are dying because they don’t know about this medicine.”

The problem is that a bunch of those studies are really low quality, or even fraudulent.

In our opinion, a bare minimum of five ivermectin papers are either misconceived, inaccurate, or otherwise based on studies that cannot exist as described. One study has already been withdrawn on the basis of our work; the other four very much should be. …

Most problematic, the studies we are certain are unreliable happen to be the same ones that show ivermectin as most effective. In general, we’ve found that many of the inconclusive trials appear to have been adequately conducted. Those of reasonable size with spectacular results, implying the miraculous effects that have garnered so much public attention and digital notoriety, have not.

Worse, the sorry state of ivermectin/Covid research may not be that unusual. In Heathers’ opinion, a lot of unreliable medical research gets published. In normal times, doctors ignore it

because it either looks “off” or is published in the wrong place. A huge gray literature exists in parallel to reliable clinical research, including work published in low-quality or outright predatory journals that will publish almost anything for money.

[This reminds me of when my wife (who is still doing fine, thank you for wondering) was taking a new drug to combat an unusual variety of cancer. Occasionally the oncologist would answer one of my questions by saying that a paper pointed in such-and-such direction, but he didn’t trust it yet. I remember one disparaging comment about “Italian journals”, which I never followed up on.]

But during a pandemic, apparent “cures” from the gray literature can slip past the skepticism of the medical community and go straight to a more responsive public.

In a pandemic, when the stakes are highest, the somewhat porous boundary between these publication worlds has all but disappeared. There is no gray literature now: Everything is a magnet for immediate attention and misunderstanding. An unbelievable, inaccurate study no longer has to linger in obscurity; it may bubble over into the public consciousness as soon as it appears online, and get passed around the internet like a lost kitten in a preschool.

[An aside: I wish I’d written that lost-kitten metaphor.]

and you also might be interested in …

Ross Douthat’s column “How I Became a Sick Person” is a reminder that underneath our divergent politics, we’re all human. Douthat describes a series of scary symptoms that his doctors couldn’t explain, culminating in a controlled but chronic illness. Feel better, Ross. I’ll be rooting for you.

So the choice has become clear: Democrats can’t preserve both the filibuster and voting rights.

The last time a voting rights bill came up, Joe Manchin claimed that it was too sweeping, and that a more targeted plan could get the ten Republican votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Manchin worked on crafting a narrower bill, which Republicans filibustered Wednesday. No Republicans at all voted to overcome the filibuster. I haven’t even heard one of them make a counterproposal. Up and down the line, Republicans are against any attempt to protect voting rights.

In light of the vote, key Democrats said they would regroup and try again to persuade Mr. Manchin and other Senate Democrats reluctant to undermine the filibuster that an overhaul of the chamber’s signature procedural tactic was the only way to protect ballot access around the country.

I’m not optimistic, but I also can’t guess how Manchin will justify himself now.

Two Republicans, former state treasurer Josh Mandel and J. D. (Hillbilly Elegy) Vance, have turned their Ohio Senate primary race into a who’s-the-craziest contest. Mandel is currently winning with tweets like this:

Maximize family time and keep working hard. Keep the freezer stocked and firearms at the ready. Buy #bitcoin and avoid debt. We will outlast these monsters and we will thrive for generations to come after God brings them down.

Vance will have to counter somehow, or risk surrendering the key doomsday-prepper voting bloc to Mandel.

On the Democratic side, Congressman Tim Ryan is also hoping to replace retiring Senator Rob Portman. His campaign website says:

Tim will fight to raise wages, make healthcare more affordable, invest in education, rebuild our public infrastructure, and revitalize manufacturing so we can make things in Ohio again. 

Sure, Tim, but what about the issues Ohio voters really care about? What are you going to do about the monsters? What role do you see yourself playing when God starts bringing them down?

We can only hope that some significant segment of former Republican voters will be disturbed by the absolute insanity that Trump has unleashed in their party. (See previous note.) But if they’re not, maybe they’ll notice the insanity Trump has unleashed in something they care more about: their churches.

Peter Wehner has just published “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart” in The Atlantic. He talks to 15 Evangelical pastors who either have left the ministry or are thinking hard about it because of the right-wing political zealotry that is tearing up their congregations.

The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

The problem is not just that Trump’s deranged rants have replaced the Sermon on the Mount as the center of many Evangelicals’ religion. It’s also that Trump’s anything-goes truth-be-damned style has corrupted how Evangelicals handle disagreements with each other.

[McLean Bible Church pastor David] Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold [for election]. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “left of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook page and a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”

BTW, clicking that right-wing website link, and then other links from there, is eye-opening. You’ll find yourself in a scary mirror world where a diabolical “woke” politics is taking over everything, including Evangelical institutions. And notice in the quote above how “social justice” has become a bad thing, something you don’t want to be accused of.

Speaking of insanity, check out Joy Pullmann’s “For Christians, Dying From Covid (or Anything Else) Is a Good Thing” over at The Federalist. Her main point is that churches should hold services and the faithful should attend them, independent of anything we know about how diseases spread.

Christians believe that life and death belong entirely to God. There is nothing we can do to make our days on earth one second longer or shorter: “all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be,” says the Psalmist.

I have to wonder if this is her position in general, or an ad hoc view she takes purely with respect to Covid. For example, does she stop her children when they start to wander into traffic? If she does, what does she think she’s accomplishing?

On the other hand, maybe her article isn’t insanity. Maybe it’s just bullshit.

Trump has a new scam: his own social network. And it’s off to such a good start.

Back in November, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick announced a reward for evidence leading to convictions for voter fraud in the 2020 election: He had $1 million of campaign money to offer, and would give a minimum of $25K to each whistleblower.

He was, of course, trying to put meat on the bones of Trump’s bogus claims of fraud. But that isn’t how it has worked out: He awarded his first $25K to a Pennsylvania poll worker who caught a Republican trying to vote twice for Trump. This guy is one of five voter fraud cases being prosecuted in Pennsylvania, four against Republicans.

Nevada also charged a Republican with voter fraud this week: A guy appears to have mailed in his dead wife’s ballot in addition to his own. Four people have been charged in Wisconsin, though we don’t know who they were trying to vote for. (At least one of them seems to have made an honest mistake: He was a felon who was out of jail but hadn’t finished his probation yet. He apparently thought he could vote legally.)

So:

• Nationwide, very few cases of 2020 voter fraud have been found.
• The handful of fraudsters who have been identified by party are mostly Republicans.

Neither of those results should surprise anybody. In spite of the claims Republicans keep making, study after study has shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. But Republicans like Dan Patrick have convinced their supporters that millions of Democrats get away with voting fraudulently every year — so it must be easy! Of course a few are going to try to “get even” by voting fraudulently themselves.

Oh, and what about dead voters? Pretty much the same story: Either the claim is false or the case involved people trying to scrounge an extra vote for Trump.

NYT columnist Michelle Goldberg reflects on Angela Merkel’s decision to let a million refugees from Syria and Africa settle in Germany in 2015.

But six years later, the catastrophes predicted by Merkel’s critics haven’t come to pass.

In the recent German election, refugees were barely an issue, and the [anti-immigrant party Alliance for Germany] lost ground. “The sense is that there has been comparatively little Islamic extremism or extremist crime resulting from this immigration, and that on the whole, the largest number of these immigrants have been successfully integrated into the German work force and into German society overall,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, an expert on Germany and trans-Atlantic relations at the Brookings Institution.

“With the passage of time,” Marton told me, Merkel “turned out to have chosen the absolutely right course for not only Germany but for the world.”

and let’s close with something tasty

Lately I’ve been cooking more, which Facebook somehow knows. So I’m being shown more videos about food. I was fascinated by this account of really authentic parmesan cheese.

Sunshine Jeremiah Wolfe

Continue reading "UU Pittsburgh Assembly to Explore the 8th Principle"

The research I do for this blog occasionally garners me some unexpected spam email. Last week, the Heritage Foundation decided I might be the target audience for its free e-pamphlet (they call it an e-book, but at 20 pages, that’s an exaggeration) “Critical Race Theory: Knowing it when you see it and fighting it when you can”. (You can request your own free copy here.)

In some sense, they weren’t wrong: I did request the pamphlet and read it, heedless of whatever future spam that might lead to. I was curious, not because I’m afraid of CRT corrupting children at my local schools, but because I have been totally puzzled by the conservative usage of the term. Whenever I hear that somebody is supposedly “teaching CRT in the public schools”, those words turn out not to mean what they would ordinarily mean.

For example, if I told you someone is teaching the Pythagorean Theorem in public schools, I would mean that there is a class (Geometry) whose textbook has a “Pythagorean Theorem” chapter, which the teacher will at some point cover. But nobody’s high school textbook has a “Critical Race Theory” chapter. If you have attended a class that was accused of teaching critical race theory, almost certainly you did not hear the phrase “critical race theory”.

Ditto for teacher training classes. Teachers might be trained on managing racial diversity in their classrooms, or creating an environment more conducive to the success of students of color. But at no point would the instructor say, “Now we’re going to learn critical race theory.” You might hear the phrase “critical race theory” if you study law, because it was coined in the 1970s to describe the idea that “formally colorblind laws can still have racially discriminatory outcomes.” But that’s not going to happen in anything related to K-12 teaching.

In short, CRT in the public schools (or the workplace or the military) is almost invariably a label that some disapproving person applies from the outside. A teacher or teacher-trainer says something, and then somebody else says “That’s critical race theory.”

Labels. So let’s talk about applying negative labels from the outside, which people of all political persuasions do, and which isn’t necessarily bad. For example, if someone is calling for a dictatorship of the proletariat to seize the means of production, I might be doing a public service if I correctly identify that person as a “communist”, whether he uses that word himself or not.

Similarly, John Gruden doesn’t call himself a “racist”, and in fact denies that he is one. But when it came out that he had written in an email that a black representative of the NFL players had “lips the size of Michelin tires”, other people characterized his statement as racist.

I don’t see anything wrong with outside-labeling in general, because people can’t be trusted choose their own labels without external criticism. If I call myself “pro-choice” and somebody else calls himself “pro-life”, it’s just part of normal political debate if we label each other “pro-abortion” and “anti-women’s-rights”.

That said, there are responsible and irresponsible ways to negatively label someone from the outside. The responsible way has several features:

• The label is defined rather than hurled like an insult. So Michael Flynn is called a “confessed felon” because he pleaded guilty to a felony. But AOC is called a “bitch” because … well, just because.
• The definition actually fits the labeled person. Too often, a negative label gets attached to somebody based on what other people say about them rather than anything they’ve said or done themselves. Sometimes an authentic quote that was harmless in its original context gets run through a game of telephone until it’s unrecognizably outrageous.
• The definition also applies to the people typically associated with the label, and captures the essence of what is blameworthy about such people. That was the problem with Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism: To the extent Goldberg defined “fascist” at all, it was a synonym for a particular sense of “totalitarian” that he confessed could also be described as “holistic”: Liberals are “fascist” because they “see no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say”. So if you want to ban sugary sodas, regulate vaping, and boycott speakers who traffic in racial slurs, Goldberg lumps you in with other “holistic” figures like Hitler and Mussolini.
• The definition justifies the emotional baggage the label is being used to carry. In some conversations, it might be reasonable to use “communist” to mean nothing more than someone who wants to redistribute wealth. But if that’s the definition you verify, you’re not entitled to also invoke the emotional resonance of being America’s enemy in the Cold War.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether a label is being applied responsibly or irresponsibly. For example, if someone calls Donald Trump a “fascist”, they could be hurling an insult at him the way they might hurl eggs at a detested speaker. Or they could have a reasonable definition of fascism that fits Trump like a glove, as well as capturing key traits that made Hitler and Mussolini what they were.

The CRT label. OK, now let’s talk specifically about critical race theory. Until recently, I’ve been assuming the CRT label was being applied irresponsibly for the first reason: The people throwing the term around were sure it was bad, but hardly any of them could say what it meant or why it was bad. Now though, at long last, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank full of the highest-level conservative intellectuals, was going to fix all that by spelling out how to recognize CRT.

Sadly, the pamphlet does not actually define CRT, but I give it credit for providing the next best thing: a list of characteristics. And here they are:

• Systemic racism. “Critical race theory’s key assertion is that racism is not the result of individual, conscious racist actions or thoughts. Racism is ‘systemic’ and ‘structural.’ It is embedded in America’s legal system, institutions, and free-enterprise system, and imposes ‘whiteness’ as the societal norm.”
• Race drives beliefs and behaviors. I didn’t make much sense out of that phrase until I read the longer explanation: “American culture is a conspiracy to perpetuate white supremacy by imposing white concepts on people of other races.”
• White privilege. Critical race theorists “say that white people are born with unearned privilege that other Americans are denied. … Any curricula or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program that compels students or employees to accept their white privilege and/or work to abandon it are part of CRT.”
• Meritocracy is a myth, because the system won’t let non-whites succeed. “Any curriculum or training program that says color blindness is a myth and advocates for eliminating standard measurements of success, including standardized testing for university admissions for reasons of racial equity, are part of CRT.”
• Equity replaces equality. “‘Equality’ means equal treatment of all Americans under the law. CRT’s ‘equity’ demands race-based discrimination. Because systemic racism has produced disparities between the races and because the system will only deepen these disparities by rewarding the ‘wrong’ criteria, government must treat individual Americans unequally according to skin color to forcibly produce equal outcomes.”

That’s it — the whole list. Notice what’s missing: the long litany of teachings that are banned in the numerous anti-CRT state laws that have passed red-state legislatures in the last few months. Here’s Tennessee’s:

a. One (1) race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
b. An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously;
c. An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual’s race or sex;
d. An individual’s moral character is determined by the individual’s race or sex;
e. An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
f. An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex;
g. A meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist, or designed by a particular race or sex to oppress members of another race or sex;
h. This state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist;
i. Promoting or advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government;
j. Promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people;
k. Ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex;
l. The rule of law does not exist, but instead is series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups;
m. All Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; or
n. Governments should deny to any person within the government’s jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

You can find exaggerated versions of Heritage’s characteristics in this list (b, for example, resembles Heritage’s “white privilege”) but the really outrageous parts don’t show up in Heritage’s pamphlet. Heritage doesn’t claim CRT teaches “One race is inherently superior to another race” or “An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex” or “All Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, much less that it promotes “violent overthrow of the United States government”.

By limiting its list of characteristics, Heritage is all but admitting that if you look for CRT in your community, you’re not going to find the teachings listed in anti-CRT laws (which mainly exist for propaganda purposes). You’re not even going to find people claiming that the “the United States is irredeemably racist”, because promoting anti-racism would be pointless if that were true.

What you might find, though, are people teaching about systemic racism, cultural imperialism, white privilege, and racially biased measures of merit, while calling for an America where the gaps between races go away in reality rather than just on paper.

Is there something wrong with that?

Before reading the Heritage pamphlet, I thought anti-CRT rhetoric failed my first test (no definition). Now that I’ve read it, I think it fails my last test (a definition that won’t carry the label’s emotional baggage).

Let’s take a look at the ideas that Heritage says CRT is really about.

Photography as paradigm. I grew up using beige-pink crayons that were labeled “Flesh”, which is pretty much the definition of “imposing whiteness as the societal norm”. My skin wasn’t exactly that color, but it was close enough to mark me as “normal” — unlike people of other races, whose flesh had some color totally different from “Flesh”.

Later I found out that my crayon was just the tip of an iceberg: Kodak’s color film (the industry standard) had been engineered to reproduce “flesh tones”, i.e. Caucasian flesh tones, with particular accuracy. Black people, on the other hand, often showed up on a color photo as white eyes and teeth in the middle of a dark blob. Black parents saw the problem immediately, but it wasn’t fixed until decades later, when furniture and chocolate makers complained that they couldn’t accurately represent their brown products in advertisements.

Aside from the dispiriting effect that dark-blob class photos must have had on black children, racially biased photography necessarily had a negative impact on entire generations of black professionals: models, photographers, TV journalists, athletes hoping to endorse products, and any other dark-skinned people who needed their images to reproduce in an attractive way. Even a movie director completely without racial bias might be reluctant to work with black actors, simply because of the technical problems involved. If you wanted a face whose subtle emotions would show up on the big screen, a white face was the better choice.

So even if bias wasn’t in individuals, it was in the system.

BTW, this is not ancient history: Facial recognition software still works better for light-skinned people than dark-skinned people.

The team that [MIT researcher Joy] Buolamwini assembled to work on the project was ethnically diverse, but the researchers found that, when it came time to present the [facial analysis] device in public, they had to rely on one of the lighter-skinned team members to demonstrate it. The system just didn’t seem to work reliably with darker-skinned users.

Curious, Buolamwini, who is black, began submitting photos of herself to commercial facial-recognition programs. In several cases, the programs failed to recognize the photos as featuring a human face at all. When they did, they consistently misclassified Buolamwini’s gender.

To me, this is the paradigm of systemic racism. Nobody at Kodak or Google was out to get black people; they just had other priorities. If photographic systems didn’t work well for dark skin, that was a shame. But, well, so what?

Now multiply that through the whole of society. System after system was designed for (and usually tested by) white people (and men and English speakers and cisgender people and neurotypical people and … and … and …). If it also happened to work for non-whites, great. But if not, who really cared?

So, in spite of the Heritage pamphlet’s claim that CRT is “a philosophy founded by law professors who used Marxist analysis”, systemic racism isn’t some invention of a Marxist propagandist; it’s a simple reality. The Heritage Foundation wants us to hide that reality from school children.

Privilege. If you’re white, like I am, it’s easy to overlook examples of your own privilege, because privilege is most obviously present when something doesn’t happen: I drive somewhere, and cops don’t pull me over for no reason. (Republican Senator Tim Scott, by comparison, says he has been pulled over 18 times for “driving while black”. I have to wonder how many of the encounters that result in police killing black men or women would not occur at all but for race.) I walk down a city street, and nobody stops and frisks me, or asks for my ID. Security people don’t shadow me in department stores. In one situation after another, I just go about my business undisturbed, never noticing that I’m enjoying a racial privilege.

Similarly, if I apply for a job, I don’t have to notice that I’m more likely to get an interview because I’m white. Or if I seek a mortgage, I just see the interest rate I’m offered, not the higher one a comparable black borrower might be asked to pay.

Some longer-term aspects of privilege are related to systemic racism: My parents were part of the expansion of the middle class that happened during the GI generation, largely because of government action. My grandfather’s farm was saved by a New Deal farm loan program (and multiplied in value many times before I sold it). After World War II, the government subsidized home ownership and higher education. It smoothed the path of unionization, which raised the wages of factory jobs like my father’s.

Some of those wealth-creating New Deal and post-war programs also worked for non-white families, but many did not. As a result, our whiteness was a factor in creating the family prosperity that allowed me to get an advanced degree without running up student debt.

In short, white privilege isn’t some sinister notion promoted to increase white guilt. (And I actually don’t feel personal guilt about this, but instead recognize a responsibility to seek a more just system.) It’s a description of how life works in America.

This aspect of American life is also something Heritage wants us to hide from children.

“Equality” without equity implies inferiority. The Heritage pamphlet makes superficial equality under the law the be-all-and-end-all of racial justice. In its response to CRT’s claim of systemic racism, the pamphlet says:

Racial discrimination is illegal in America. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the government rejected racial discrimination and made it illegal in all public aspects of our lives. Likewise, the civil rights movement affirmed that prejudice has no place in American life. There are racists in America, as in all other countries, but the vast majority of Americans we work and worship with, live and learn alongside, embrace the equal rights and dignity of all.

So that settles that, I guess. The laws on paper say we don’t discriminate, so never mind that we continue to see large racial gaps in income, wealth, incarceration, infant mortality, life expectancy, and just about every other aspect of life. Asking for these gaps to close is demanding “equity” — equal outcomes — which (in Heritage’s world) marks you as a critical race theorist.

But think about what the persistence of these gaps implies, if (as Heritage claims) no widespread discrimination or systemic racism actually exists. If black people can’t keep up in America, and yet there is nothing wrong with America, then there must be something wrong with black people.

There’s no getting around that logic. The Heritage Foundation may not want to put it in print or say it in polite company, but I see no way to embrace their pamphlet as truth without also believing that black people are inherently inferior to white people.

What’s more, I think school children (of all races) are smart enough to draw that conclusion for themselves: If the game is fair, and yet the same people always win, then the winners must just be better than the losers.

In short, if we label all alternative explanations of racial gaps as “critical race theory” and ban schools from teaching them, then by process of elimination we’re really teaching the only remaining explanation: white superiority. The Heritage pamphlet may claim it wants to “ensure school curriculums uphold the intrinsic equality of all humans”. But in fact they’re guaranteeing that children will learn the exact opposite.

Heritage’s white-comforting fantasy world. If I restate the Heritage pamphlet’s underlying message in my own words, it amounts to this: “We had a nice fantasy going until these damned teachers started telling kids how the world really works.”

In the Heritage fantasy world, America outlawed racism back in the 1960s, so any advantages or disadvantages people have accumulated since then are purely due to their individual talent and hard work, or lack of talent and laziness.

If two people are given the same opportunity, but only one takes advantage of it, they will naturally have different outcomes. The only way government can try to produce equal outcomes for them is by taking away the result from the first person, or unfairly giving the unearned benefit to the second. Attempts by government officials to take the fruits of your achievements and give them to those who did not earn it will hurt those whose rewards are diminished as well the intended beneficiaries. This betrays the idea that the American dream belongs to all of us, and everyone should have the same opportunity to pursue success.

And let’s not talk at all about inherited wealth that originated in the Jim Crow era, which Heritage wants to safeguard against “death taxes”.

America isn’t dominated by “white culture”, but by “universal values” (which white people happened to discover first because of their innate superiority, but don’t say that part out loud).

American culture is based on a timeless understanding of rights rooted in the inherent value and nature of the human race. People of all colors and national backgrounds come here and flourish because our culture embraces common humanity and dignity.

And while it may be true that white people are doing better in America (in just about every measurable way) than black people, that can only mean that white people are enjoying “the fruits of your achievement”, which should not be taken away and given to “those who did not earn it”.

The real way to deal with racial disparities is just not to measure them, because that’s (as the Tennessee law puts it) “promoting division between, or resentment of, a race”. The ideal society is a colorblind society, where nobody notices that the people on top are mostly white and the people on the bottom are mostly black. As soon as you start noticing stuff like that, you’re “dividing America“, which was perfectly united in its color blindness until social justice warriors started quoting statistics.

Or at least it would be nice to think so, if you’re white.

2022. Republican candidates are hoping to use their anti-CRT campaign to regain ground that Trump lost in the white suburbs by being too explicitly racist. (The test case is next month’s Virginia governor’s race.) CRT is supposed to threaten precisely those white parents who were disturbed by Charlottesville. It’s supposed to remind them that Democrats are too pro-black, without pushing an explicitly anti-black message that might ring alarm bells.

That tactic might work, because critical race theory really does constitute a threat to prosperous white people. It threatens to torpedo the very comfortable fantasy that the game they’re winning is perfectly fair.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111043052/https://whitebearunitarian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/10-24-21-audio.mp3

This week I responded to a slice of conservative spam: The Heritage Foundation was offering me its free e-book (well, e-pamphlet, really) on how to spot and combat critical race theory. I had to get it: I keep accusing conservatives of turning “critical race theory” into a pejorative term with no actual meaning, and here was a right-wing think tank offering to tell me what it means. I have to read stuff like this just to keep myself honest (which is probably why I keep getting conservative spam).

The result is this week’s featured post: “What Conservatives Tell Themselves About Critical Race Theory”. The short version: When they feel obligated to define “critical race theory” and attach it to actual quotes from the people supposedly promoting it, conservatives serve a pretty thin soup that is nothing at all like those anti-CRT laws that talk about making white people feel ashamed of their whiteness and blaming them for the crimes of their ancestors. In a nutshell, CRT means teaching people about systemic racism.

Imagine my horror. Innocent children in our public schools are being taught that whites have advantages in our society! Clearly we need to storm the school boards and get this stopped.

Anyway, that post should be out before 10 EDT.

In the weekly summary, Democrats appear to be creeping towards the finish line on the Build Back Better plan. It’s going to look small compared to earlier proposals, but if you’d described it to me on January 5 (when the election of Senators Warnock and Ossoff gave Democrats control of the Senate) I think I’d have been happy. Once something passes, Democrats will have to work on their marketing so that voters realize how much has been accomplished rather than focusing only on what has been left out. Congress has cited Steve Bannon for criminal contempt, moving the case to Merrick Garland’s in-box. The Trumpist spirit is unleashing incredible craziness in Republican primaries, and also in Evangelical churches. And Covid numbers continue to drop everywhere but here in the Northeast.

That should be out sometime after noon.

Way back when dirt was new and I was an exceptionally earnest high school student, we learned that before there was William Shakespearethere was Geoffrey Chaucer, period.  In those distant days students were generally assigned at least a chunk of The Canterbury Tales to read and try and decipher.  We were told it was English, but it was Greek to most of us.  I remember that after some hours of labor, I got a hazy idea of what he was writing about.

English literature prior to the 20th Century apart from a medicinal dose of the Bard, a dollop of Dickens, and a few lines from a dreamy Romantic poethas long been banished from most high school curricula.  You might not even encounter Chaucer today in many introductory survey level English Lit. courses in College.  Certainly, you would have to be an English major and toiling in the 200-300 level courses before you really encounter him.

Perhaps things are better for Geoffrey in England. One hopes so.

I bring this up because October 25 mark the anniversary of Chaucer’s passing in 1400.  He was then the resident of the Inne of the Shrews in Greenwich.  After a lifetime as a mostly successful courtier, he had been out of favor and broke, but was recently restored to Royal favor.  But he may have been murdered by those who did not take kindly to his portrayal of the clergy, or so some stories have it.  None-the-less, he was respectable enough to be buried in an unimportant corner of Westminster Abby.  In later years other literary men asked to be interred near him in what eventually became the revered Poet’s Corner.

Today his fans celebrate his life on his death day because no one knows exactly when he was born.  It was about 1342 or ’43 in London.  He came from a Normanfamily whose name originally meant shoemaker.  But the family fortunes had risen.  His father was a successful wine merchant and minor courtier—deputy to the King’s Butler.  Nothing is known of his education except that it was quite good.  By the time young Geoffrey was ready to enter the service of the noble and highborn himself at about age 13 he could already read and write Latin, French, and Italian.

That career started with an appointment to the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster and Prince Lionelin 1357.  Two years later he was a soldierin France fighting for King Edward IIIin the 100 Years War.  He was evidently a good and valuable soldier because after being capturedby the French he was paroled under the terms of the Treaty of Brétignyin 1360.  The King himself and other courtiers contributed to raising the substantial ransom of £16.  It was during his presumably not too-uncomfortable imprisonment that Chaucer completed, according to some sources his first literary work, Romaunt of the Rose, a translation from the French into the Anglo-Norman language of the court.

Around 1337 Chaucer apparently married very well indeed.  His wife, or at least the mother of his two sons, was Philippa Roe, the sister of the future wife of John of Gaunt, third surviving son of Edward III.  Due to this happy circumstance, he enjoyed the support and patronage of the Prince as long as he lived.

In 1369 he would re-work that earlier Romaunt of the Rose into vernacular English, what we now know as Middle English in The Book of the Duchess, dedicated to his sister-in-law after her death.

Such connection earned him more important and lucrative appointments.  From 1338-78 he traveled extensively in Europe on several diplomatic and commercial assignments.  He was said to have met the Italian Poet Petrarch on one such trip.  He was also exposed to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was written in vernacular Italianrather than Latin.  This was supposedly an inspiration for Chaucer to work in vernacular English but as we have seen, he was already working in that language.

Back in England he was awarded the very lucrative post of Comptroller of the Customs and Subside of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides for the Port of London, just the kind of position where money could not help but fill the purse of a poor, but honest public servant.  He survived a charge of rape by Cecile Champaigne and was able to get her to withdraw her suit after a hefty private settlement. 

He could survive scandal, but not the shifting sands of politics.  With John of Gaunt out of favor, so was he.  He lost his post and free housing.  But he moved to Kent, got a minor sinecure as Postmaster, and eventually was elected to Parliament.  Away from London and the demands of court Chaucer devoted himself more and more to literature.  He composed Troilus and Criseyde, a long poem based on a Trojan romance by the Italian poet Boccaccio. 

When his wife died and with John out of favor, Chaucer was sued for debt.  Several friends and acquaintances were executed.  But in 1389 John returned to power and influence over his nephew Richard II, who in turn favored the poet with a new appointment as Clerk of the King’s Works responsible for the upkeepand repair governmental buildings in and around London.  He was the beneficiary of Royal gifts and pensions in the 1390’s.

It was during this period that he did most of his work on his magnum opus, The Canterbury Tales.  The loose collection was said to have been inspired in some ways by Dante’s journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  But Chaucer’s tales were grounded in the real, even mundane world. 

A group of 30 pilgrims gather for a journey to the grave and shrine of Thomas à Becket in an Inn much like the one in which Chaucer himself resided.  It was a remarkably diverse group cutting across the rigid class lines of England at the time.  Included in the group and telling their stories at the behest of the inn keeperwere a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath.  The stories, some of them borrowed from earlier tales and sources, were often humorous and sometimes bawdy.

Chaucer never lived to complete the work.  Perhaps because he was interrupted by another episode of political intrigue. 

After Chaucer’s patron John died, Richard II disinherited his son, Henry ofBolingbrook.  Henry returned from exile in France in 1399 to supposedly re-claim his lands and titles.  He quickly gathered a large army against the king.  He deposedRichard and seized the crown.  Chaucer was reportedly in Henry’s service at the time, ever loyal to the line of John of Gaunt.  As Henry IV the new king rewarded such loyal service with a generous increase in his annuity. 

But he never received either lands or title and remained until he died the next year, as he had lived, a commoner with uncommon connections to Royalty.

For those who may have forgotten—and for those who have never seen it, here is a sample of Chaucer’s most famous work:

Here begins the Book of the Tales of Canterbury

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

Bifil that in that seson on a day,

In southwerk at the tabard as I lay

Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage

To caunterbury with ful devout corage,

At nyght was come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle

In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,

That toward caunterbury wolden ryde.

The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

 And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

So hadde I spoken with hem everichon

 That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,

And made forward erly for to ryse,

To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse.

But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,

 Er that I ferther in this tale pace,

Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun

To telle yow al the condicioun

Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,

And whiche they weren, and of what degree,

And eek in what array that they were inne;

And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

—Geoffrey Chaucer 

Part Three of a history I’m writing, telling the story of Unitarians in Palo Alto from the founding of the town in 1891 up to the dissolution of the old Unitarian Church of Palo Alto in 1934. If you want the footnotes, you’ll have to wait until the print version of this history comes out in the spring of 2022.

Part One — Part Two

Building the Institution, 1909-1915

Following Rev. Sydney Snow’s departure, the leaders of the Palo Alto church were able to attract Rev. Clarence Reed as their next minister. Reed had been ordained in the Methodist Episcopal church in 1894, served a series of short-term pastorates in that denomination, and wound up in San Francisco in 1904. He then decided he was a Unitarian, resigned from his Methodist pastorate to spend a year at Harvard Divinity School, and was called to the Alameda Unitarian Church. The Alameda church was even smaller and had less money than the Palo Alto church, but it proved convenient for Reed to serve there while pursuing graduate study in philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. The Alameda church had paid him $1500 per year (roughly $44,000 in 2020 dollars), and by moving to Palo Alto he received a modest increase in his salary to $1600 per year (roughly $47,000 in 2020 dollars).

Reed took two extended sabbaticals while at Palo Alto. In 1910, just a year after arriving at the church, he spent eight months traveling in Europe recovering from a health crisis. Then in 1914, he spent six months traveling in East Asia. Thus although he served the Palo Alto church from 1909 to 1915, he was actually at the church for only five of those six years.

Reed’s relationship with the Board of Trustees was not entirely harmonious. There are moments in the Board minutes where Reed is portrayed as ambitious, driven, and annoying, while for their part the Trustees seem content to remain a small, close-knit group comfortably supported financially by the American Unitarian Association. Not to put too fine a point on it, Reed wanted the church to grow, and the Trustees weren’t that interested. Reed also managed to ruffle the feathers of other lay leaders. Emma Rendtorff sounds slightly resentful when she notes in her Sunday school records that Reed took over running the Sunday school from her, and then didn’t even keep careful records of attendance. Yet Reed must have done something right, for he increased average attendance in the Sunday school to around 60 students, probably twice the average attendance Emma Rendtorff was able to achieve.

Despite the low-level tension between Reed and some lay leaders, the years when Reed was minister were a golden age for the church. Sunday attendance probably averaged around 60 to 70. The congregation finally built the social hall that they had hoped for since they bought the building lot in 1906. Sunday school enrollment climbed to 90 children and teenagers; the church had enough children and teens to stage a fairly elaborate play, “King Persifer’s Crown,” in May, 1916. But beyond these statistics, what was the church like during this golden age?

By our standards, the Unitarian Church Palo Alto church did little of what we now call social justice work. In the early twenty-first century, Unitarian Universalists believe social justice work should be one of the primary purposes of local congregations. But Unitarian churches a century ago did not necessarily share this belief, nor would they have known the phrase “social justice.” Today’s Unitarian Universalists congregation’s might provide social services (e.g., hosting a homeless shelter), take a public stand on an issue, participate in direct witness (e.g., protests, rallies), and/or provide education about societal ills. By contrast, Palo Alto Unitarians of the early twentieth century understood their church as an organization for spiritual nurture; changing society was less the responsibility of the church as an institution, and more the responsiblity of the individual members of the church.

Individual Palo Alto Unitarians were directly active in several social reform movements during the years from 1909 to 1915. Reform of women’s rights undoubtedly had the widest support. Alice Locke Park, Annie Corbert, Emily Karns Dixon, Helen Sutliff, and other Unitarian women were deeply involved in the woman suffrage issue, culminating in the 1911 statewide ballot measure which gave women the right to vote in California. In addition to the political activism of the woman suffrage movement, many women lived out the fight for women’s rights in their own lives. Caroline Morrison is a case in point. She was reportedly the first woman to earn a Doctorate of Science degree in the United States, when she earned her D.Sci. in physics at Cornell in 1898. She married in that same year, but taught physics, co-wrote a physics textbook, and published at least one journal article before abandoning her career to have children. Another case in point is Dr. Eugenie Johnson, who began practicing medicine in 1907 and continued through the early 1960s; she was able to pursue her career because she never married.

Unitarian women also belonged to other progressive women’s organizations. A dozen or so Unitarians were members of the Palo Alto Woman’s Club, including Emily Karns Dixon, Fannie Rosebrook, and Dr. Anna E. Peck, another woman physician. Fannie Rosebrook and probably other Unitarians were members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

A number of Palo Alto Unitarians were pacifists. Alice Park was probably the most active of the pacifists, but Anna Coggins, Guido Marx, Karl Rendtorff, Marion Alderton, and Ewald Flügel all held pacifist views as well. Marion Alderton was Vice President of the Palo Alto Branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Annie Tait was a member of the organization. David Starr Jordan, though he was barely involved in the congregation during the years leading up to the First World War, was also a well-known pacifist. But there were others in the church who were most definitely not pacifists. By 1916, Melville Anderson ardently supported American involvement in the war, putting a strain on his friendship with Ewald Flügel, a pacifist. In the years leading up to the war, ill feelings would grow between the pacifists and the war supporters in the congregation.

The church also included a handful of eugenicists. Although eugenics is now widely discredited, during the early twentieth century era some white people saw eugenics as another means for carrying out the Progressive ideals of creating a good society through science and rationality. Vernon Kellogg, professor of biology at Stanford, was one of these Unitarian eugenicists, and William Herbert Carruth was another. Most famously, David Starr Jordan, who was only loosely affiliated with the church in these years but widely considered to be a Unitarian, was a prominent eugenicist.

The presence of eugenicists helps us understand the racial attitudes of the church and its members. All the church members and friends were white. Most were descended from northern Europeans, a fact important to remember in those days of prejudice against Europeans from Mediterranean countries. The church records show no interest in or awareness of the racism faced by black or indigenous people in those years. Indeed, George Morell, the publisher of the Palo Alto Times who was peripherally associated with the church in 1919, publicly advocated for racially segregated housing in Palo Alto. Most church members evinced little interest in racial justice, and some went further than that: before moving to Palo Alto, Isabel Dye Butler had actively worked to enslave indigenous people. However, there were also a few individuals who showed remarkably enlightened racial attitudes, like Dr. Eugenie Johnson, who was known in Palo Alto for her lack of racial bias in treating patients.

Aside from the activities of individual Unitarians, the church did distribute modest charitable contributions on a fairly regular basis. For example, Clarence Reed announced to the Board in November, 1914, that a special offering for the Red Cross was $79.20 (roughly $2,075 in 2020 dollars); in that same month, the church donated an unspecified amount to combat child labor. The church also made regular contributions to various appeals from the American Unitarian Association, to help further the cause of Unitarianism, and the members of the church probably saw these contributions as contributing to the betterment of society.

One remarkably progressive step taken by the congregation was hiring Rev. Florence Buck while Clarence Reed went on sabbatical in 1910. By 1910, the wider Unitarian movement had turned against women ministers. Perhaps the Palo Alto church only hired Florence Buck because they could pay a woman less money than a man; but the congregation may also have been influenced both by the memory of Eliza Tupper Wilkes, and the examples of professional women who were members of the congregation. In any case, after seeing Buck in the pulpit, sixteen-year-old Helen Kreps was inspired to pursue a career in ministry (tragically, Kreps died in the great influenza epidemic, just before completing her divinity degree). Since other girls surely found inspiration and a role model in Florence Buck, her presence in the pulpit helped the wider cause of women’s rights.

The church relied on a few key lay leaders to keep the institution going. Karl and Emma Rendtorff were the most important lay leaders in the congregation from 1905 through 1913, constantly serving in various leadership roles. But when William Herbert Carruth came to Palo Alto in 1913, he immediately moved into a central leadership role in the church, both because of his personal charisma and because of his experience as a lay leader at the national and local levels. Before arriving in Palo Alto, Carruth had served on the national board of the American Unitarian Association, and had been the national president of the Unitarian Laymen’s League. Less than a year after moving to Palo Alto, he was elected president of the Board of Trustees of the Palo Alto church. Until his untimely death in 1925, William Carruth was also one of the central leaders of the church, along with the Rendtorffs.

Just before Carruth had arrived in Palo Alto, Isabel Dye Butler, another important lay leader, had died. Isabel, with her husband John Strang Butler, were a wealthy couple who gave the single largest contribution to the church lot subscription fund in 1906, and continued as significant donors thereafter. After Isabel died, John moved to Oakland and ended his financial contributions to the church. After John left Palo Alto, Emily Karns Dixon was the one wealthy person left in the church, and she never gave as generously as did the Butlers.

During this golden age of the church, the Sunday school doubled in size, from about 45 scholars to about 90. By 1915, the Sunday school was able to use the recently completed Social Hall as well as an outdoor garden designed by Clarence Reed as an outdoor classroom. The garden, measuring fifty by seventy feet, was laid out within the rectangle formed by the Social Hall and the church; a pergola covered with climbing roses and vines outlined the other two sides of this rectangle, leaving a gravel court twenty-five by forty feet in the center. A large sandbox in one corner could accommodate all the younger children, while the other age groups met in various places under the pergola.

The curriculum was an innovative as the outdoor meeting place. Reed wrote:

“One purpose of the outdoor Sunday school has been to discover the symbolism that will make religious ideals real to boys and girls. Ant and spider houses were constructed in order to teach industry by the observance of the habits of ants, and perseverance by the study of spiders. A bird’s nest in a rosebush has been guarded by the pupils as a sacred trust. A class of boys has been held spellbound by a graduate student of Stanford University, through the teaching of religious ideals by means of a series of experiments illustrating the great discoveries of science. Artist’s clay has been used to make a map of Palestine, and to build an Oriental house.”

Religious education that used dioramas, nature study, and science was surprisingly progressive for 1915.

Another highlight of the golden age of the church was the visit of the Bahá’í prophet ‘Abdu’l Bahá. David Starr Jordan invited ‘Abdu’l Bahá to speak at Stanford on October 8, 1912, and probably arranged for the prophet to speak at the Unitarian church that evening. After Clarence Reed gave a brief introduction, ‘Abdu’l Bahá’s began his address thus:

“Praise be to God, this evening I have come to a Unitarian Church. This Church is called Unitarian—attributed to unity. Hence I desire to discourse on the subject of unity, which is a fundamental basis of Divine teachings.”

At the conclusion of ‘Abdu’l Bahá’s remarks, Reed gave a brief and very Unitarian conclusion to the evening:

“I feel that a man of God has spoken to us tonight. There is no way I know to close the service than with a prayer—not a prayer in spoken words, but a prayer in silence. Let each person pray in his own way for the coming of the universal religion—the religion of love, the religion of peace, a religion of the fullness of life. (Silence.) You are dismissed.”

This address is still remembered by Bahá’ís today, and occasionally a Bahá’í will stop by the current Unitarian Universalist church, only to be disappointed when told that it is not the building in which ‘Abdu’l Bahá spoke.

The Unitarian Church of Palo Alto’s golden age lasted until Clarence Reed’s departure in the summer of 1915. Reed, being an ambitious man, must have welcomed the energy that William Herbert Carruth’s arrival brought to the congregation, but not even Carruth’s charisma could fix the fundamental problems of the church: Palo Alto did not have a large enough population to support a larger church, and more to the point, the congregation had no ambition to increase in size. In 1916, Reed picked a fight with the Board of Trustees over finances, indirectly accusing the treasurer, Andrew McLaughlin, of financial mismanagement. After McLaughlin resigned as treasurer, an audit found little wrong with the church finances—but Reed was already on his way out, and was immediately called by the Unitarian church in Oakland. By moving to a larger, wealthier church, Reed nearly doubled his salary, from $1,600 per year in Palo Alto to $3,000 per year (roughly $78,000 in 2020 dollars) in Oakland. Probably from the start, Reed viewed the the Palo Alto church as a just a stepping stone in his career. After six years there, he was ready to take the next step.

Part four coming soon.

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111043031/http://www.austinuuav.org/audio/2021-10-24_Healing_Power_of_Truth.mp3

“The Land of Memory” (October 24, 2021) Worship Service

The artist Etel Adnan, wrote that her memories were like a forest with unstable boundaries. Adnan was born in Lebanon, lived in France, then moved to California, living at the base of Mount Tamalpais, where she wrote and painted for many years. Her paintings were a way to explore memories and make meaning of them. Navigating the land of memory can be complex and challenging. But it can lead us into a deeper understanding of who we are, and how to live more fully into our lives as we make our way forward.

Rev. Alyson Jacks, Associate Minister; Richard Davis-Lowell, Worship Associate; Reiko Oda Lane, Organist; UUSF Choir; Mark Sumner, Music Director; Wm. García Ganz, Pianist

Shulee Ong, Camera; Jonathan Silk, Communications Director; Joe Chapot, Live Chat Moderator; Thomas Brown, Sexton; Athena Papadakos, Flowers; Alex Darr, Les James, Tom Brookshire, Zoom Coffee Hour

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042948/https://content.uusf.org/podcast/20211024AJSermon.mp3

What is essential to living a good life? What non-essentials continue to receive our energy and time? In this historical moment filled with ambiguity, unknowns, and endless distractions, it’s time to ground ourselves in the essentials. Join Rev. Elaine Aron-Tenbrink for a reflection on what really matters.

The Rev. Elaine Aron-Tenbrink serves as Assistant Minister at Foothills Unitarian Church in Fort Collins, Colorado. Prior to this, she served both in congregations and as a chaplain in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Charleston, South Carolina. Elaine enjoys hiking and biking in Northern Colorado with her two young children and her husband, Jason, who grew up in the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos.

SERVICE NOTES

WELCOME!

New to our church community? Sign our guestbook and let us know if you’d like to get more connected.
For more information on our church community, visit us on the web at http://www.uulosalamos.org or call at 505-662-2346. 
Connect with us on Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/uulosalamos
If you would like to submit a joy or sorrow to be read during next week’s service, we invite you to write it in our Virtual Prayer Book.
Have questions? While our minister, the Rev. John Cullinan, is on sabbatical, contact our office administrator at office@uulosalamos.org.

MUSIC CREDITS

• “Butterfly” from Lyric Pieces, Op. 43, no. 1 by Edvard Grieg.  (Tate Plohr, piano). Music Public Domain, video used by permission.“Om Mani Padme Hum” (ancient Sanskrit mantra) with “Amazing Grace” (words: John Newton, music: Columbian Harmony, 1829) and “‘Tis a Gift to Be Simple” (words: Joseph Bracket, music: American Shaker tune). Arrangement, audio production, and video production by Christopher Watkins Lamb.  Songs Public Domain, arrangement and video used by permission of Foothills Unitarian Church, Fort Collins, CO.
• “Meditation on Breathing” by Sarah Dan Jones. Music recorded by Rev. Christopher Watkins Lamb with piano from Dyane Rogelstad.  Filmed and edited by Rev. Christopher Watkins Lamb.  Song used by permission of the UUA (Unitarian Universalist Association).  Video used by permission of Foothills Unitarian Church, Fort Collins, CO.
  
• “Notturno” from Lyric Pieces, Op. 54, no. 4 by Edvard Grieg.  (Tate Plohr, piano). Music Public Domain, video used by permission.
• Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky.  (JeeYeon Plohr, piano). Music Public Domain, video used by permission. 
• “The Way,” text: unknown author, music: Nylea L. Butler-Moore. (UU Virtual Singers with Larry Rybarcyk, acoustic guitar & Nylea Butler-Moore, piano; Nylea Butler-Moore, Music Director; Rick Bolton, AV Engineer.) Used by permission.

Permission to stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-730948. All rights reserved.
Permission to stream music in this service obtained from CHRISTIAN COPYRIGHT SOLUTIONS with license #10770.

OTHER NOTES

*“The Frog Prince,” by Chris Buice (used with permission)

Benediction by Jan Richardson from The Painted Prayerbook (janrichardson.com) (used with permission)

*permission granted through the UUA

OFFERTORY

Our Share the Plate partner for October is the Roadrunner Food Bank. 

100% of all offered this month will be given to our partner.

We are now using Givelify.com to process the weekly offering: https://giv.li/5jtcps

SERVICE PARTICIPANTS

• Rev. Elaine Aron-Tenbrink, Guest Speaker
• Rev. Gretchen Haley, Guest Speaker 
• Patrick Webb and Anne Marsh, Worship Associates
• Nylea Butler-Moore, Director of Music
• Tate Plohr, piano
• JeeYeon Plohr, piano
• UU Virtual Singers: Alissa Grissom, Kelly Shea, Nylea Butler-Moore, Rebecca Howard, Anne Marsh, Kathy Gursky, Mike Begnaud, & Skip Dunn, with Larry Rybarcyk, acoustic guitar  
• Renae Mitchell, Mike Begnaud, and Rick Bolton, AV techs

Attached media: https://web.archive.org/web/20211111042918/https://www.uulosalamos.org/ucla/pulpit/2021/20211024-Essential.mp3

Please join us next Wednesday (27 October 2021) at 12 noon for our weekly Zoom lunch.

Bring your lunch and meet up with your All Souls friends, have lunch, and just catch up.

The Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry, Illinois has appointed a new interim Music Director to aid the congregation in providing quality musical programing while it continues to conduct Sunday morning services via Zoom due to the continued of the Coronavirus pandemic.  Although the congregation hopes to return to in-person services as soon as it is safe and possible, that is weeks or months away.

Dr. Jie Yi is currently the Music Directorof the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington, New Yorkand will continue in that position as well. 

Jie holds a Doctor of Music Arts degreein conducting from Manhattan School of Music. He is the authorof Chinese for Singers, the first comprehensive guide for Western singers to use in singing Chinese texts. Jie conducted Messe de Minuit by Charpentier, Musikalische Exequien by Schütz, and Missa O quam gloriosum by Victoria at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2018 and 2019. He also conducted Handel’s coronation anthem Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened at Riverside Church in 2018. In 2015, he made his Carnegie Hall debut, conducting Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata. He was Chorus Masterand Assistant Conductor at the Shanghai Opera from 2008 to 2013.

Jie is a recipient of the Asian Culture Council Fellowship (2011) and the U.S. China Cultural Institute Fellowship for Young Conductors (2006). As pianist and vocal coach, he performed at La Lingua della Lirica Festival in Italy(2015–16) and performed Bellini’s opera I Capuletti e i Montecchiat Manhattan School of Music (2013).

Jie will be able to work remotely from Huntington because he is especially adept at the technical aspectsof creating videos blending the voices of many individual singers recording their parts from their homes. He has already begun work with members of the Tree of Life Choir and together they expect to create music for services two times a month and prepare a Christmas/Yule/Solstice/Winter holiday music service in December.  He will work closely in planning services with Tree of Life’s Interim Minister, the Rev. Jenn Gracen.

The congregation’s choir is one of the most highly regarded in McHenry County and is known for its wide repertoireincluding not only hymns and other traditional worship music but also jazz, pop, folk, Broadway, international music, and classical. They toured internationally to Romania (Transylvania) in 2016 and have performed in both McHenry County choral music programs and with regional Unitarian Universalist choirs.  The ensemble includes several outstanding soloists as well.

Tree of Life is also still conducting a searchfor a permanent Music Director who will be able to lead the choir and coordinate other music as the congregation returns to live, in-person worship.

Tree of Life Sunday services are currently held via Zoom at 10:45 am.  Visit the congregation at https://treeoflifeuu.org/ for links to the services. 

Please join us on Saturday (23 October 2021) at 10:30 AM for our weekly meditation group with Larry Androes.

This is a sitting Buddhist meditation including a brief introduction to mindfulness meditation, 20 minutes of sitting, and followed by a weekly teaching.

The group is free and open to all.

For more information, contact Larry via email or phone using (318) 272-0014.

“Grant us a measure of your…peace; fill us, each, with hope and good cheer; and grant that each one be surrounded by [love, and]… we pray that you speak a word of encouragement and grace to every human heart.”
-Tom Schade

What encouragement does your heart need to hear today? How can you find that?

Wow -- last night’s Pop Up for Democracy Rally was an amazing event! 

As of this morning, UUs have reached 29 of our 50 US Senators, telling them to pass the Freedom to Vote Act -- that’s 58% of the Senate!

Our efforts are working and we need to keep the pressure on.  In fact, today, the New York Times reported that President Biden is "open to ending the filibuster." 

So, before we do anything else, let’s make sure EVERY Senator hears from us by November 1st - share this link — bit.ly/CallSenate1021 — and ask everyone you know to take two-minutes to call their Senators!  

We’re grateful you took the time to join us last night and that you made a call -- thank you!

The rest of this includes all the materials from last night’s Pop Up for Democracy Rally, including all the mentioned links, campaigns, events, and other asks. There are so many ways to engage in the vital and crucial work of protecting our democracy and electoral rights, so find the one that works for you!

Amplify the central message of last night’s event: Save the Freedom to Vote Act and end the filibuster:

• Video of the event

• PDF of the slide presentation

• Full video of presentation from Elizabeth Hira, Brennan Center for Justice on why the Freedom to Vote legislation is transformational beyond voting rights (16.5 minutes, we showed 10 mins. last night)

Multiply the impact by inviting more people to join you!

• Take 2 minutes to call your senator: Save the Freedom the Vote Act: bit.ly/CallSenate1021

• Download the Side With Love Action Center guide to get started organizing your congregation! sidewithlove.org/actioncenterguide 

Ground your work by engaging locally in your community and in partnership:

• Save the Date: Nov Week of Action: The broad coalition that the UUA is part of, Declaration for American Democracy, will soon be unveiling Freedom to Vote - Time to Act Week of Action during the November Congressional Recess that begins on November 11th. There will soon be a website, toolkit to host an action, and a map of actions available soon. Can you pledge to host a November Distributed Action?     

• How to prepare: Join the October 25 Community of Praxis Meeting to prepare your own November Action!  

• Phonebank UUs to have them take action: Join the October 28 Phonebank to invite UUs to action!  

Here are the other crucial links from last night:

• Send a Letter to Your Senator Urging Filibuster Reform  

• Send a personalized message to your Senator urging them to support the Freedom to Vote Act & John Lewis Voting Rights Act here.  

• Constituents needed for meetings with Republican Senators from AK, AL, LA, ME OH, PA.   

• Are you in West Virginia? 

  • Join the Mass Moral Revival and Rally, October 24th at 4pm, featuring Rev. Dr. William Barber and the Poor People's Campaign along with other West Virginia faith leaders, poor and low-wealth West Virginians, and other coalition partners to call on Sen. Manchin to do better.

• In the DC area? Join other UUs who will be at the following Freedom to Vote Relay events! 

  • Freedom to Vote Friday Shindig at Ben’s Chili Bowl  

  • Freedom to Vote Saturday Rally in DC  

• From Arizona? Learn about more upcoming actions to pressure Sen. Sinema and build our power at UUJAZ (UU Justice Arizona) Issues & Action Day tomorrow, Saturday, October 23rd.

• Are you connected with your UU State Action Network? Many of them are working on redistricting and fair maps to counter gerrymandering and other voter suppression efforts.  Check out the Coalition of UU State Action Networks (CUUSAN) to see if there’s one for your state: https://cuusan.org/   

• From the Fix or Nix the Filibuster Campaign, a Filibuster Reform Toolkit.  

Being with you in this work is so meaningful and we’re grateful to be doing it together. 

In faith and solidarity,

Audra Friend

Side With Love Digital Communications, Technology, and Data Specialist

on behalf of the entire Side With Love team

You’ve heard the news. Now’s the time to jump on your holiday book buying. Supply chain delays are affecting many industries, including the book industry. Some new books you’ve been waiting for may not make it to bookstores in time for the holiday, and hot sellers may be sold out by December and not reprinted in time. On top of that, what’s thrown a wrench into the works is—wait for it—the pandemic. Who saw that plot twist coming? (We’d probably be in less of this mess if everyone got vaccinated, but hey, let’s not digress.) So, gifts you would typically start buying in December may not be available. That’s why we, along with your favorite authors and bookstores, are recommending that you get started now if you haven’t already while bookstores are stocked up with your favorite titles.

October is the new December. Trust us: This is not like seeing Christmas decorations in retail stores in before Halloween.

We’re starting you off with some selections for the season from our catalog. Take a look!

~~~

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons
Imani Perry

“Breathe is what is says it is, a letter from a mother to her sons, but it is more than that. It’s a meditation on child-rearing, world-building, fire-starting, and peace-building. Imani Perry combines rigor and heart, and the result is a magic mirror showing us who we are, how we got here, and who we may become.”
—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance
Ntozake Shange

“A gorgeous last offering from one of our most gifted and multifaceted artists. Her passion for dance, just like her passion for words, is among the many reasons she will be missed, though these insightful interviews, ruminations, and reflections will continue to be a balm, across generations, from her to us.”
—Edwidge Danticat, author of Everything Inside

How to Love a Country: Poems
Richard Blanco

“This clear-seeing and forthright volume marks Blanco as a major, deeply relevant poet.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

Man’s Search for Meaning
Viktor E. Frankl

“This is a book I reread a lot . . . it gives me hope . . . it gives me a sense of strength.”
—Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360/CNN

One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race
Yaba Blay

“One Drop presents a nuanced exploration of racial identity that serves as a practical guide for thinking critically about what it means to be Black in the twenty-first century.”
—Tarana J. Burke, author, activist, and founder of the MeToo movement

Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays
Mary Oliver

“Oliver has gained enormous popularity in recent years for the accessible yet highly articulate and profound treatment she gives each poem . . . This title will bring much pleasure to the many readers who claim Oliver as their favorite poet, as well as to people new to her work.”
—Library Journal

Palmares
Gayl Jones

“This story shimmers. Shakes. Wails. Moves to rhythms long forgotten . . . in many ways: holy. [A] masterpiece.”
—The New York Times Book Review

The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction: 1948-1985
James Baldwin

“With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic acuity, Baldwin fearlessly articulates issues of race, democracy, and American identity.”
—Toni Morrison

Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay, a Graphic Novel
David Lester with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle

“David Lester’s raw, expressive visual approach perfectly delivers. Prophet Against Slavery is a crucial account of abolitionism’s religious framework, its courage and moral clarity often recast as sin or insanity, and the necessity of taking outside risks in pursuit of justice and equality.”
—Nate Powell, National Book Award–winning artist of the March trilogy about US congressman John Lewis

The Radiant Lives of Animals
Linda Hogan

“Linda Hogan’s work is rooted in truth and mystery.”
—Louise Erdrich

A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories
Compiled and edited by Bettye Collier-Thomas

“Here was a veritable who’s who of Black writers, whose powerful stories and poems ran the gamut of literary expressions—from the tragic to the comic, fables to romance. A book for all seasons, these stories are bound to amuse, educate, and inspire all kids, from one to ninety-two.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America
Keisha N. Blain

“[A] riveting and timely exploration of Hamer’s life. . . . Brilliantly constructed to be both forward and backward looking, Blain’s book functions simultaneously as a much needed history lesson and an indispensable guide for modern activists.”
—New York Times Book Review

~~~

Here’s what you can do as we get through this season.

1. See something you’d like a loved one to have? Buy it now!
2. If you aren’t too blitzed by Zoom fatigue and working remotely, consider buying it as an e-book or audiobook.
3. Are your eyes set on a title that’s not coming out for another few months? Smash that preorder button now! Your authors and indie bookstores will love you and appreciate you for this.

Which brings us to the next point. Speaking of indies, we need to really show up for them and for venues like Bookshop, Indiebound, and our personal favorite, InSpirt UU Book and Gift Shop. Publishing delays are likely to hit them harder than large chain bookstores. Holiday season keeps indies afloat during the slower seasons. The pandemic hasn’t made this any easier for them.

We’re all in this together. We thank you, your authors thank you, and your indie bookstores thank you.

Yesterday Facebook's memory dredge hauled up a status report from way back in 2010.  I had completely forgottenabout it but after years of ever increasing American polarization and its attendant personal trauma I found it more relevant than ever.  It was also found versemaking a poem simply by breaking up the lines exactly as originally written.  I have discovered of few of the over they years.  At least they are shortand sweet and don’t drone on forever.

An Encounter

Discovered in a Facebook status from

October 21, 2010

Pleasantries with a wave and nod acquaintance of some years. 

Don’t know each other’s last names.

You know—weather, sports, a bit of family trivia.

A passing word betrays an affiliation. 

The eyes narrow, the jaw sets just so. 

In an instant the other, the enemy, the sub-human. 

Whose eyes, whose jaw?

—Patrick Murfin

“O God, your love is unimposing
Yet firm and steadfast,
Present to all those who would know your peace.
You challenge me in my arrogance and
Move me to listen deeply when I fail—
As I always do—to see the fuller picture.”
-Alex Jensen

Listen deeply today to learn what you need to forgive and be forgiven. What is it you need to hear?

Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care. In the U.S. it’s $500.

The New York Times: How Other Nations Pay for Child Care

Child care in the United States is in a crisis — and it’s time for change.

The New York Times recently shared shocking statistics about child care support in the United States. While most rich countries around the world contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care, the United States contributes just $500 per year, per child.

The United States — one of the richest countries in the world — spends only $500 per child on early childhood care each year.

This number is staggeringly low, and the truth is undeniable.

In the developed world, the United States is an outlier in its abysmal levels of financial support for child care.

Affordable child care is essential to millions of workers and their families. Parents and caregivers cannot work if their infants and toddlers are not safe and cared for.

President Biden has proposed spending $450 billion to subsidize child care and offer universal preschool as part of his 10-year, $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan. Congress is now on the verge of making transformational policy change for babies by investing in comprehensive paid leave, high-quality child care, and an expanded Child Tax Credit.

But negotiations continue, and these objectives remain at risk.

We need to make sure that Congress understands that scaling any of these components back could lower the odds that our children will thrive.

The needs of America’s children are non-negotiable.

Funding and building a child care infrastructure is key to supporting our families, providing the recovery our nation needs, and addressing America’s shameful underinvestment in child care.

It’s time that every family in the United States has access to a high-quality, affordable child care system. Help make this vision a reality by letting your legislators know that high-quality child care should be affordable for every family in America.

Here are 3 Ways to Voice Your Support for Child Care:

1. Share Your Story: Child Care Aware of America has a vision for the future of child care. Contact your legislators and share your personal child care story here: https://www.childcareaware.org/our-issues/advocacy/take-action/support-affordable-child-care/

2. Write a Letter: Take action with MomsRising to urge Congress to support kids and families by passing critical care infrastructure: https://action.momsrising.org/sign/NY_Times_Care_RR/?source=action

3. Send a Note: Urge Congress to pass the Build Back Better Act by sending a note through Think Babies: https://www.thinkbabies.org/take-action-build-back-better-act/

Further Reading

Fact Sheet on the Build Back Better Act

The Build Back Better Act Would Greatly Lower Families’ Child Care Costs

The True Cost of High-Quality Child Care Across the United States

The post Action Alert: 3 Ways to Voice Your Support for Child Care appeared first on Promise the Children.

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