Archive for January, 2012

Day 16: Turn the Tide on Anti-LGBT Constitutional Amendments

1 Comment | Share On Facebook| Day 16: Turn the Tide on Anti-LGBT Constitutional Amendments Share/Save/Bookmark Jan 31, 2012

The message below went out on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 to those Standing on the Side of Love supporters who signed up for daily Thirty Days of Love emails. You can sign-up for the 30 Days of Love emails here.

Every once in a while, a group of people does something so loving that it moves me to tears.

This past Sunday, at my beloved UU Fellowship of Raleigh (UUFR), some of us told our stories about how we are affected by discrimination against same-gender couples. We spoke of how things will get even worse if North Carolina’s anti-LGBT, anti-family, so-called “marriage” amendment passes on May 8th. We agreed to an ambitious call to action: our 500+ members will gather 5,000 pledge commitments to vote against the Amendment and do 50 hours of phone banks. Then, unanimously, all present members stood up in a congregational meeting to vote for our statement of conscience opposing the Amendment. We were, literally, all standing together on the side of love. And when the statement passed, there was a spontaneous outburst of clapping and celebratory shouts of joy. Like me, many of my LGBT friends and allies were moved to tears. This vote said to us that we matter, we have value, and we deserve equality; it said we are not alone in this fight and our fellow UU’s are standing with us.

Check out this video from UUFR and learn how you can help:





I hope UU’s from across the country will move me to tears again – by doing virtual phone banks to fight anti-gay amendments in both North Carolina and Minnesota.

Click here to sign up to phone bank.

Another time I was moved to tears was during the act of public witness at our June 2011 UUA General Assembly in Charlotte, NC, where thousands of UU’s in a sea of yellow Standing on the Side of Love t-shirts stood together in opposition to this same anti-LGBT, anti-family NC amendment. It was the power of love and the power of numbers combined that touched not only me, but the many members of what has now become the Coalition to Protect NC Families, which is working to defeat the Amendment. Jen Jones, their Communications Director, was so inspired by Standing on the Side of Love and similar justice movements that she is literally running across North Carolina with “RACE to the Ballot” to raise awareness about the harms of the Amendment. It is no coincidence that she is wearing RACE gear in the same color yellow to be in solidarity with us UU’s; she expects to stand with us UU’s again in the coming weeks and months at rallies before NC’s May 8th ballot referendum.

And I expect to be moved to tears by UU’s across the country when I find out how many people sign up to do what they can from their own states – virtual phone banks to North Carolina and Minnesota voters to urge them to vote against these discriminatory amendments.

While it’s an uphill battle to fight these amendments, with enough volunteers to reach the NC and MN voters who are willing to vote against these amendments, we can turn the tide of discrimination.

Please, move us to tears again with your willingness to stand with us on the side of love. Please volunteer to phone bank now.

In faith,

Tracy Hollister

Tracy Hollister
UU Fellowship of Raleigh

Tags: , , ,

The Story of Now in North Carolina

No Comments | Share On Facebook| The Story of Now in North Carolina Share/Save/Bookmark Jan 31, 2012

The message below went out on Tuesday January 31, 2012 to Standing on the Side of Love supporters. You can sign-up for these emails here.

Here in North Carolina, we’ve had much to draw upon as we journey through the Thirty Days of Love.  We now enter the third week of the campaign – the “Story of Now.” The Standing on the Side of Love campaign explains “Story of Now” this way: “By telling a “story of now” you can communicate the urgent challenge we are called upon to face, the hope that we can face it, and choices we must take to act.”

In our state, there is little doubt about one of our primary, urgent challenges: this May, we face a ballot measure that would amend our constitution to ban marriage equality, civil unions and domestic partnerships. Unsurprisingly, Unitarian Universalists are at the forefront of working against this amendment, taking the lead in organizing the faith community, hosting phone banks in our congregations, raising money for the campaign, and planning public witnesses to express our opposition.  The UUA and Standing on the Side of Love campaign have been a crucial help to us here in North Carolina as well as in Minnesota, providing grant funds for our efforts and strategic organizing and communications support.

On behalf of all of us in North Carolina and Minnesota working to defeat these amendments in our states, I’m asking for your help:  Please sign up to phone bank voters in North Carolina and Minnesota and urge them to vote against these amendments.

Click here to sign up.

These calls help inspire voter turnout. Your personal words move people’s hearts as well as their feet to the ballot. The groups working in both states to defeat the amendments can set people up from across the country to do “virtual phone banking.”  You simply need access to a computer and a phone.  When you sign up, someone will contact you about phone banking when it’s convenient for you in the coming weeks and months.  Your words, even thousands of miles away, have power.

There are many words you could use to describe me: Unitarian Universalist, minister, friend, activist, woman, person of faith, and lesbian. But these are just words that point to who we are as a people. These are just words used in the story of who I am. The amendment approaching will use words against us: words that will hurt, words that put some outside the circle, unfair words, dangerous words, and unjust words. Words have been written that will change our constitution to discriminate.

It is not just this amendment defining marriage as the only legal union between a man and a woman. It is not just these words.  It is every word, every day when you have to live in fear. It is every face that longs to at last have a dream of a world where you would not be judged by who you love but by how you love. It is not just these amendments. It is the startling truth of youth who are dying because of words that institutionalize prejudice. They are not just words.  Words have power.

But you have words too. Words in a service, words in the public square, words on a pledge, words that move people to vote, words that protect, words that heal and words that change the world. So what am I asking you to do? Use your words.

Click here to sign up to phone bank. Help use your words to protect and to heal.

With so much momentum towards marriage equality in places like Maryland, Maine, Washington, and New Jersey, it’s clear that the pendulum is swinging towards justice for all. But in North Carolina and Minnesota, we still need help to make an important statement: in this country, the era of constitutional discrimination is over!

In Faith,

Rev. Robin Tanner
Minister, Piedmont Unitarian Universalist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina

Tags: , , ,

Day 15: Proclaim Love

2 Comments | Share On Facebook| Day 15: Proclaim Love Share/Save/Bookmark Jan 30, 2012

The message below went out on Monday, January 30, 2012 to those Standing on the Side of Love supporters who signed up for daily Thirty Days of Love emails. You can sign-up for the 30 Days of Love emails here.

As I’ve watched the presidential campaign season unfold around me these past few weeks, I can’t help but notice that the underlying themes of fear, of scarcity, and of “the other” permeate every discussion. Our political culture has become toxic on both sides. We have become obsessed with ensuring specific benefits for ourselves, our subset of society, and even our country at the expense of others instead of creating solutions that make our global community as a whole better, stronger, and more just.

Instead of allowing yourself to be seduced by this pervasive narrative of fear and scarcity, take a look at this video of Congressman Keith Ellison speaking about love and abundance: “Proclaim love, proclaim love not just as a fuzzy warm notion but an active principle, engaged in informing us about how we live with each other, with our planet, with this economy, with the way we do business.”

 

For today’s action, let’s counter our society’s oppressive, hateful rhetoric by making this video go viral.  Let’s allow Rep. Ellison’s love-inspired words reverberate around the World Wide Web.  And as we use this week to discuss our “story of now,” let us use his message of love and abundance to inform how we engage with our community.

“But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

In faith and love,

Meredith Lukow
Program Assistant
Standing on the Side of Love

Tags: , ,

Day 14: Love is My Higher Power

No Comments | Share On Facebook| Day 14: Love is My Higher Power Share/Save/Bookmark Jan 29, 2012

The message below went out on Sunday, January 29, 2012 to those Standing on the Side of Love supporters who signed up for daily Thirty Days of Love emails. You can sign-up for the 30 Days of Love emails here.

In a moment of candor between a professor and myself several years ago, he said to me, “I love the Unitarians. You are a bright light in the world, but you do not understand evil.” I knew he was right. I had struggled with my own relativist notions of the concept… indeed I thought of it as a concept. I had rejected sin preferring the idea of original blessing, preferring the leap of faith made by stating that all beings have an inherent worth and dignity. My people, I thought, were a thoroughly modern people.

Until the 20th Century, both philosophy and theology were obsessed with the work of theodicy: a systematic understanding and justification of suffering and evil all the while defending God’s goodness. Great thinkers spent their lives trying to explain how evil could exist if God was omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful) and omnipresent (everywhere). The problem of theodicy, of understanding evil while believing that goodness and love is a greater power, is perhaps a struggle Unitarian Universalists would do well to pick up again. It is not enough to simply ask why do bad things happen to good people? We must ask what is the vision of the people who would seek justice and equality and redemption and forgiveness in our world? We must ask, if love is a greater power, a higher power, what is our relationship to that? Are we merely individuals at play in a larger system that makes good people create bad consequences wishing it were otherwise?

Today’s action for 30 Days of Love is to hold a theological reflection discussion to think about this moment in time as a community and how our faith impacts our response to this moment.

Schedule a time to gather during or after services, or a time on another day, and use our 30 Days of Love Theological Reflection Guide to help your discussion. Download the PDF here:

Two summers ago, I travelled to Phoenix, AZ to participate in a mass rally against the racial profiling of American citizens and the arrests and deportations of people who had crossed the border without permission. I purchased a clerical collar for the event because I wanted to be recognized as minister when I was arrested. After our action, illegal in the eyes of the system, I sat in the basement of the 4th St. Jail along with five or six Latino activists; all of us in zip tie handcuffs. My collar attracted the attention of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the man behind the raids being carried out with the passage of SB 1070. There is no shortage of people who call this man evil. Just as there is no shortage of people who call this man a hero. As he stood over me, he asked, “Why are you here?”

Unfortunately, I answered him in a most juvenile and disingenuous way. I looked up in defiance and said “Jesus sent me.” This wasn’t true and I regret saying it. Sure, I might be able to spin some story about how Jesus stood up for the disinherited and I was trying to follow that mandate. But the truth is, I knew that Sheriff Arpio is a devout Christian and I was trying to insult him. I got the desired effect. He screwed up his face and walked away. Instead of being honest about my desire to be in relationship with that higher power of goodness and love I made a joke, and not a very good one.

The truth is, I am scared of taking on the mandate of living in the world guided by the idea that there is a love and goodness that will care for me and help me care for others. It is much easier, much safer to sit behind my intellectual analyses of a cold, systematic world where the banality of evil rules, where the micro-offenses of human beings slowly destroy us, where the source of our creation, God if you will, is indifferent at best. This is a fear of intimacy: intimacy with fellow humans as well as intimacy with God.

But if we are to be a part of the vision that brings healing and health to our nation we must step into the holy and prayerful practice of exploring intimacy. There is no better place for this type of study and reflection than our congregations.

Please take a moment to download the 30 Days of Love Theological Reflection Guide and to discuss this with your congregation. Download the PDF document:

There is a lot of healing left to do in this country and in the world. There is a lot of injustice and we are called as a people to do what we can to counter it. We can fight for justice as individuals, but I would rather do it as a community guided by a vision. So when someone asks us “Why are you here?” We can answer, “Because there is evil in the world. It comes in many forms ranging from brutal and immediate to the complex and bureaucratic. But evil is not the highest power. We are here because love and goodness is the highest power. We are here because love asked us to come, to sit before you and say this cannot happen any longer.”

Rev. Ian White Maher
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Queens

Tags: ,

Day 13: Sharing a Common Meal; Finding Common Ground

No Comments | Share On Facebook| Day 13: Sharing a Common Meal; Finding Common Ground Share/Save/Bookmark Jan 28, 2012

The message below went out on Saturday, January 28, 2012 to those Standing on the Side of Love supporters who signed up for daily Thirty Days of Love emails. You can sign-up for the 30 Days of Love emails here.

I have always felt like sharing a meal is one of the most important and powerful tools for ministry. Sitting around a table and taking part together in that divine, daily ritual of dinner can break boundaries, calm tensions, create connections, and open up the space for dialog in a way that is often impossible otherwise.

Today’s action for 30 Days of Love is to invite people to share a meal, or to feed others in our community.

As congregations, we use food to build community. We serve meals in times of celebration, and we serve meals in times of mourning. We serve meals to bring people together. Whether we share meals within our church community or we take meals outside of our church walls into the larger community, we have the possibility of creating connections that will affect us in ways we can’t believe.

A few weeks ago, our congregation in Reston, VA decided to cook a meal for the people at Occupy DC. From the first day we made the announcement that we were looking for people to help cook, I was amazed by how many people were talking about the Occupy movement: why we supported their cause, what income inequality meant for us, and how we could help. Days before we even heated up the oven, the anticipation of cooking our meal stirred up dialogue and fired up passions.

Once the day finally came to prepare the food, our congregation had more donations and volunteers than we needed. Our small kitchen was packed with volunteers sharing stories about how they found our church, their families and their youth, sharing hopes for the future, and enjoying the freedom to just speak anything that came to mind. We all grew closer as we worked, and I have seen those connections continue to grow on Sunday mornings since.

The occupiers that we feed want everyone to understand that it helps them keep going and gives them strength to know that people outside of their group support what they are doing. It was also clear from their compliments that they had not had a lot of access to freshly cooked vegetables and healthy food, which gave us great joy to provide. Through that one meal, a lot of people were brought together in different ways and many more had a hot meal on a cold night. I can think of very few things we can do together in one day that can have that big an impact.

Whether we gather together as a church or we sit around our own dinner table, the power of food to make space for connection is something we cannot forget as we go through our meals each day. Open up your table to someone or someones that you hope to build a relationship with.  Share a meal with those who are in need of community or support. You will be amazed with the ease that a common meal gives to finding common ground. This is something you can do by yourself, with some friends or with your church community. However and whenever you can, open your table to let it be a place of connection. It’s one more way that we can make a difference.

Good Luck!

Justin Martin

Director of Religious Education

Unitarian Universalist Church in Reston, VA

Tags: , ,

« Older Entries