Issue 30                                                                                          Fall/Winter 1995/96

Dean Drake, Editor Peggy Sexton, Administrator

There is excited talk throughout our Denomination about how we must transform ourselves into a leftist mirror image of the Christian Coalition in order to challenge the "radical right." While not defining "radical right," most UU’s who advocate this tend to equate it with some ill-defined "Christian-Republican conspiracy" that is attempting to destroy civilization as we know it. And, without stating it, some of the UU’s advocating this move recognize that this means transforming the UUA from a religious organization to a religiously-oriented political organization.

This transition is not just more of the same old left-wing leaning of UUism, but could well represent a fundamental change in what the UUA is, and who can rightfully consider themselves a Unitarian Universalist. As a religion, we are bound together by a set of principles and a commonly accepted approach to religion. While a preponderance of members may have one political preference, this preference is not a defining characteristic of being a UU. In this, we are no different than any other religion: for example, although most fundamentalist Baptists tend to be politically conservative, not all are, and specific political beliefs are not considered to be a prerequisite to being a Baptist.

GA 1996 is coming June 20 - 25 to Indianapolis, Indiana. One theme this year is "Racial Justice." This alone makes GA ‘96 worth attending: just wait until you hear the official explanation of why Louis Farrakhan is not racist while every Caucasian in the world is -- it’s truly one of the funniest inversions of logic you are likely to hear anywhere!

More importantly, the delegates at this GA will be voting on the final adoption of the General Resolution that will officially require Unitarian Universalists to oppose the radical right (whatever that means). Depending on how this resolution (if passed) is interpreted, it could make our denomination a very unfriendly place for the Conservative Forum and its members.

I was in Boston the first week of December attending New Congregation’s Training at our denominational headquarters in Boston. For those of you who have never been to our New England Mecca, there are quest living quarters behind the offices at 25 Beacon Street. These living spaces are used by people having business at 25 Beacon (like us New Congregation trainees) as well as UU’s visiting Boston.

Recently, UU’s have been describing themselves with the "L" word with increasing frequency. I attended a UU revival where the speaker said, "Come on, admit it, we’re LIBERALS." I heard our UUA moderator say much the same thing at a gathering of "the faithful" last year. The proposed General Resolution on "Opposing the Radical Right" is yet another manifestation of the return to political orthodoxy among Unitarian Universalists.

I could spend the time, as I have since the Conservative Forum was founded in 1985, pointing out the error of the assumption that all true UU’s must be politically liberal. But that is not my concern today; rather, I am very concerned that UU’s aren’t even very good at being liberal: we don’t have the foggiest notion of what a liberal is and isn’t.

By history and definition, a liberal is a person who believes in and promotes human liberty -- often promoting revolution and chaos to advance that end. Outside the U.S., it is fairly clear what a liberal is and isn’t. In Russia, for example, liberals are tearing down a repressive central government that attempted to dictate the operation of their economy, and are replacing it with democratic and capitalist institutions. Conservatives still worship at the altar of Karl Marx and believe it’s a crime to make a profit.

While often imitated by "liberal" lawmakers, Robin Hood was definitely not a liberal. Robin was a common, garden-variety thief who gave the neighboring common folks a small percentage of the booty in order to buy their support and cooperation (much like Willy Sutton in the 1930’s). Robin Hood behaved much more like the Marxist version of a gangster.

Before going further, I’d like to make it clear that I have met many true liberals whom I respect. They have always believed in human beings and have worked to liberate them from the institutions that oppress them. True liberals do not rob from the rich to give to the poor. Rather, they work to give everyone an opportunity to be rich. Liberals understand that any tyranny over human liberty is wrong, whether the tyranny is one individual ruling over another or governments ruling over the individual. True liberals are not elitist (i.e., believing that there is one set of morals for the politically correct and another for everyone else). Rather, true liberals understand that they are as human as everyone else, and do not ask others to make sacrifices that they are not willing to make themselves.

Finally, liberals believe in changing those things which don’t work (or could be made to work better) rather than blindly supporting the status quo. Thus, I find it humorous to read in a recent church newsletter how we UU’s must defend "all we have worked for" against the onslaught of Republicans -- in other words, staunch defenders of the status quo.

I think that at this point, we should begin to ask ourselves: is this the liberally correct place to be, defending things like our current demoralizing welfare establishment, a fiscally bankrupt Medicare system and morally bankrupt third-trimester abortion procedures? No reasonable person can say any of the above (or, for that matter, most of the things under attack in Washington these days) cannot be improved upon. Yet the "liberal" establishment opposes any attempt at reform simply because they are afraid that reform is the beginning of a trip down a slippery slope to ruin and damnation. I hate to be the one to point it out, but this goes beyond even conservatism into strictly reactionary.

Over the years, I have become convinced that the news that most Americans see or listen to is carefully crafted to reflect only one side of any given story. This is not, as is often supposed, the result of any great conspiracy, but rather the end result of a purely free market process: TV and the newspapers are giving their customers (us) exactly what we want, entertaining news that doesn’t require us to think.

This slant to environmental news persists because it is scary and sells a lot of papers (and boosts the ratings of news shows), but it is also untrue. Trying to maintain this lie in reporting gets to be difficult when it becomes necessary to use real numbers, as a recent article I read in the newspaper showed.

The article was reporting on numbers released by the UN comparing the world in 1994 vs 1960. If you read the article carefully, you discovered the following facts:

Any rational analysis would conclude that the world had, indeed, made tremendous progress toward a world with less poverty and greater health. And, one could even further speculate that, since this unprecedented reduction in world poverty coincided with the fall of communism and spread of capitalism, free enterprise may well bring us into a 21st century in which poverty has been all but eliminated.

So what headline did this article have? "End of World Poverty in Sight" or "2/3 of the World Out of Poverty in 1994, vs 1/3 in 1960" perhaps?

I am no stranger to paranoid conspiracy theories. My father, rest his soul, was one of the true believer in conspiracies. Before World War II, he bought into Charles Lindbergh’s line that a Jewish conspiracy was drawing the U.S. into that war. During the reign of intellectual terror brought on by Senator McCarthy, he fervently believed in Communists in government, and fellow-travelers everywhere else. In his last years, my father remained stubbornly convinced that the "Trilateral Commission" was continuing the effort of these previous conspiracies to bring down the United States and "Europeanize" us.

Having grown up in this environment, I became something of a student of this mindset. I don’t believe this addiction to conspiracies is related to intelligence: my father, although chronically depressed most of his life, was very intelligent. At one time, I thought it had something to do with lack of education, but after observing many a college-educated UU buying into things like Oliver Stone’s nutty JFK assassination conspiracy theory, I don’t think education is the key.

Rather, I have concluded that the two primary factors that make people prefer to see conspiracies are: 1) lack of first-hand awareness (i.e., ignorance), and 2) an irrational belief in supermen (and superwomen).

Not having any first-hand experience with how decisions are made and executed, it was very easy for my father to rationalize in his mind that some conspiracy was responsible for changes that disturbed him.

Similarly, my father could not for a minute believe that these changes were the cumulative result of everyday decisions made by millions of ordinary, flawed, imperfect people. My father had a very low opinion of most people -- he could not bring himself to believe that such creatures were responsible for the rise and fall of civilizations. He just couldn’t accept that anything, good or evil -- just happened. Thus, he was more than willing to believe that a handful of sinister, super-intelligent and well-coordinated people were destroying his image of the U.S. as opposed to accepting that imperfect but well-meaning people just screwed up. To him, a well-run hell was preferable to a bumbling heaven.

These are the ghosts of conspiracies of year’s past; conspiracies theories that I believed then (and now) are laughable. But what of the ghosts of conspiracies present?

As editor of SIGMA, I am entitled to a listing in the National Press Directory for Conservatives, which, in turn, gets me on a lot of right-wing mailing lists. Not surprisingly, conservative groups have their crazy conspiracy theories, such as the supposed government assassination of Vincent Foster. As a Unitarian Universalist, I also am on the mailing lists of a number of left-wing organizations, which, not surprisingly, are often as loony as the conspiracy theories of the right.

Yes, the ghosts of Senator McCarthy are still with us, and probably always will be. But, like recreational drug use, bizarre lifestyles and swastikas, they are usually (and rightfully) confined to the extremes. Unfortunately, I am beginning to see many similarities between the rhetoric characteristic of the McCarthy era and recent writings in the UU World (specifically, the November/ December 1995 issue, which was dedicated to fighting the radical right).

An example of the kind of language I am referring to is found on page 20, entitled "Religious Right Code Words." This piece begins "Not everyone who uses the following terms is a member or ally of the religious right, but use of one or more should send up a red flag." What followed was a list of words such as "breakdown in morality," "Christian values," "Conservative values," "crackdown on pornography," "decency," excellence in education," "family values," Judeo-Christian principles or values," "moral absolutes," "natural law," "New Age," "parental choice or control," "school choice," "tax reform/reduction," "traditional American values," and "traditional families". Remember: use of one or more of these phrases is enough to raise the suspicion that you are or might have been a member or fellow traveler of the radical right!

To see how dangerous and twisted this is, take the first paragraph of the above piece and replace the words "religious right" with "Communist party." The results sound chillingly familiar to someone who remembers old Senator Joe: "Not everyone who uses the following terms is a member or ally of the Communist party, but use of one or more should send up a red flag."