I do not believe in treating the seven principles as a creed. I don't hear them used as an explanation of what we're about, I do not like to see them used as evidence for someone being a good or bad Unitarian and I certainly don't like seeing little children memorizing them in RE.
Don't want songs about them, don't want calligraphy bookmarks of them, don't want them on the wall of the church, etc, etc, and soforth.
BUT I feel I'm in a clear minority.
UUs talk constantly about we need to be able to tell people what we're about, talk about our values, etc, etc and soforth.
So they use the seven principles for that.
Here's my question.
Given that people are going to treat the seven principles as a creed anyway and that a change to them would effect everybody at least in the sense that we'd need new bookmarks and RE materials, shouldn't we have more than a bunch of GA junkies voting for them?
Should there be a special rule that if you're going to change the seven principles, they need to be ratified by X percent of congregations?
Discuss.
CC
18 comments:
You're framing the debate too narrowly. Why limit it to the 7 P's?
I suggest reframing it to ask whether and to what extent the GA delegation and plenary process, as presently practiced, expresses the legitimate grassroots voice of the congregations on any question.
For example, are plenary delegates validly chosen? Should they be permitted to vote against, or in the absence of, express instructions from their congregations? When should questions be put to the delegates, as opposed to a majority vote of individual UUs who bother to cast a vote? Do the present quorum requirements encourage, or impede, truly representative consensus decisions? Does all the non-plenary programming (and unprogrammed hoopla) aimed at non-delegate attendees enrich, or detract from, the real business of the assembly? Would other models of voting or decision-making produce more representative and therefore legitimate decisions, or is this the best we can reasonably expect?
As you know, I've been calling for GA decisions to be ratified by the UUA as a whole for years- I brought it up at the "Fifth Principle" workshop at Salt Lake. Turns out there are reasons why it won't work; they involve arching one eyebrow and saying "You don't understand our polity and governance".
Joel,
What a stupid thing for that person to say to you. Not understanding it and wanting to change it are different things.
I have policy issues with some of the questions you and Fausto ask, but not polity ones.
CC
Actually, they are working on all that: we went to a workshop on ideas for how to change our governance to make it more democratic.
They involve getting rid of GA as we know it. Having a meeting that is pretty much plenaries only, but attendance is subsidized so that money is less of a determinant of who votes.
Sound good to you guys? Sounds dour to me.
As for how delegates are picked and how their votes are determined: that is decided by each congregation in an active illustration of congregational polity. Not good enough?
I never memorized the seven principles. I don't use them much in my "elevator speech". How do you explain UUism to someone who's unfamiliar with it?
I have been trying to explain UU since the 60s when I was president of my LRY. People get it or they don't.
The seven principles are useful shorthand and a bookmark is a fine place for them. It's fine with me that they hang in my congregation's front hall. I'd be real upset to find that (a la the 10 commandments in old Episcopal churches and King's Chapel) they've moved in beside the lectern.
Fausto raises the big question I have had. Joel, when you say "to be ratified by the UUA as a whole" do you mean having individual UU members throughout the county vote? Since we make such a strong claim about the UUA's members being congregations and not individuals -- and that was a big issue at merger, IIRC -- then yes, it would be outside UUA rules and practice to involve individuals in a vote.
But that isn't to say that that's not a goal to be considered. Of course, I can't think of a denomination in the Abrahamic religions where that would be considered, except ours.
I actually like the 7 principles just the way they are. I realize there's something in bylaws about reviewing them, but I don't see any point in wordsmithing them anymore. There's nothing broken about them that I can see.
But yes, I agree ... I think decisions like this should be decided in the same way that the presidential election was - each church gets a certain number of delegate votes and - those who are unable to attend GA can vote via absentee ballot.
I actually like the 7 principles just the way they are. I realize there's something in bylaws about reviewing them, but I don't see any point in wordsmithing them anymore. There's nothing broken about them that I can see.
But yes, I agree ... I think decisions like this should be decided in the same way that the presidential election was - each church gets a certain number of delegate votes and - those who are unable to attend GA can vote via absentee ballot.
Non-UU here, but I tend to interpret any mention of "principles" in the way that we learned about principles in studying bioethics in college: they are values that we seek to maximize while understanding that they may conflict with one another.
For bioethics, these are autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence and justice (as put forward by the awesome Childress and Beauchamp). Many observers have noted that in American bioethics, autonomy tends to be treated as the most important principle, whereas European bioethics puts more emphasis on justice.
It would be nonsensical to try to treat these principles as similar to commandments, because they don't command any particular action and in a given situation might be competing values. For example, a late-term abortion may bring non-maleficence and autonomy into conflict.
Anyway, with regard to UU's 7 principles, given that one of them is "the use of the democratic process within our congregations," it seems mildly hypocritical for someone to oppose such processes in determining whether to ratify the principles.
@ Hafidha -- the number of votes that each congregation got for the Presidential election is equal to the number of delegates they are eligible to send to GA to vote on business matters. The reason there aren't absentee ballots for business matters is that many resolutions and other documents are amended during the business sessions, often in such ways that would change how a delegate might vote on them.
Think of delegates like members of the House of Representatives -- each congregation (state) chooses them according to their own bylaws to represent them during GA (congressional session), and if your delegate (representative) is not present when a vote is taken, they are registered as not voting.
The big question is the financial barriers for each congregation sending a full delegation. And then there are issues of delegates who are at GA but skip Plenary -- many ministers among them.
There has been talk of creating ways for delegates to participate online, rather than having to be present, which I think would be a great thing.
I REALLY don't like it when the congregations approve something, and then the delegates want to change it (cf. the global warming thing from a couple of years ago).
Often the same relatively wealthy people with lots of free time come back year after year and it bugs me that we hand them that much power to overrule the congregations.
CC
UUs talk constantly about we need to be able to tell people what we're about, talk about our values, etc, etc and soforth.
I get the feeling few UUs talk to non UUs about ourselves and what it is we do at Church. It might be helpful if we practiced that personal outreach a little more. (My Daughter does it at school and has brought a number of people to Church that way.)
I rarely hear reference to the seven principles. I think one of them was used as a club on me once, but that's it.
@ CC -- the congregations didn't approve that, it was submitted through the Commission on Social Witness with congregational input.
A further point, regarding your original question about having a special procedure for amending Article II (the P&P) -- we already have that. For any By-law to be changed, the change is released by the Board for review by the congregations a year before it is put on the Final Agenda at GA for a vote -- like the proposed changes to the Presidential election process that were circulated this year.
But for Article II, it's a two-vote process, on a non-amendable document resulting from a Board-sanctioned review of the Article, which is what the Commission on Appraisal came up with for this year. The first year's vote (this year) requires a simple majority of delegates, and then the document is sent out for review to the congregations. The second year, the document is still non-amendable, and it requires a 2/3 vote of the delegates to pass. That's a pretty high bar, especially if the document is presented as a whole, instead of by section, as it was this year.
So, this is supposed to be a sort of a ratification process, since the congregations have a whole year to look at the proposed changes after the first vote, and instruct their delegates to vote a certain way.
And for something like this, where amendments aren't an option, absentee ballots would seem to make sense.
But what is required in all cases is deeper engagement on the part of individuals in congregations, led by the clergy, one would think, in our process.
I've got a post brewing on this subject as well.
"The seven principles are useful shorthand..."
Very true, Diggit, thank you.
It's not so much the principles as how they are used or misused by people. Too often UUs selectively quote this or that principle to justify a particular position, and in isolation from one another.
To me, the principles are a way of expressing our core values into words; each principle addresses a part of that core. The problem comes when we fail to look past the words to what they express, and worse, fail to see the whole behind the parts.
CC wrote:
-snip-
"Given that people are going to treat the seven principles as a creed anyway and that a change to them would effect everybody at least in the sense that we'd need new bookmarks and RE materials, shouldn't we have more than a bunch of GA junkies voting for them?"
CC and others,
I'm curious if your congregation offered any of the adult RE classes, youth RE classes, etc that were designed to collect congregational input on the Article II revision.
The UUA Commission on Appraisal had a web page set up where both individual UU and congregational UU feedback could be sent to them.
This part of the revision process was available to anyone who attended a UU congregation offering these RE classes and/or anyone who had internet access (which is more than just the "GA junkies" to use your term).
Our high school youth group did the youth version of the COA Article II curriculum. I collected their feedback and submitted it through the COA web page.
Our DRE did the same thing for the adult RE class that explored Article II.
These inputs were collected to create the first draft Article II revision. Subsequent feedback led to second draft which was further tweaked by the UUA Board.
At this point, all that was left for GA delegates was ratification because the UUA bylaws forbid amending Article II revisions at GA.
As a denominational affairs rep, I asked a UUA trustee who blogs if congregations could vote on the proposed Article II revision through absentee ballots.
He asked around and found out that the UUA bylaws only allow for absentee balloting on elections. Even though Article II revisions cannot be amended and are voted as proposed by the UUA Board, they cannot be voted upon through absentee voting.
Even though common sense suggests allowing absentee voting in these cases where a non-amendable bylaw revision is proposed, it can't happen until the UUA bylaws are amended.
And the dissatisfaction over the Article II revision being non-amendable may lead to the UUA bylaws being changed so they can be amended at GA. And this would make it harder to implement absentee voting for this.
@ Steve -- there are many ways the process could be changed, including requiring a second vote on a final text without amendment, and allowing for absentees on that final vote. One hopes that the people studying these proposed bylaw changes are considering all the options.
I do think it is important to allow amendments at GA on many things, because there is something about getting a whole bunch of passionate and usually smart people together, where sometimes they come up with ideas to fix something or other that the authors never even thought of. Several of the AIWs this year went through very smart amendments that made them much better, for example (even though they're still pretty toothless). When it comes to making statements of fact or feeling, I think editing in the moment is invaluable.
When it comes to Article II, however, I think it does matter that there is more consensus than not, just because it is one of the more formative documents used in many ways by our movement -- it serves as our statement of who we are and what we value as an Association. I think that if the revision had squeaked by this year's vote by the same margin that it failed (13 votes), there would be no way to get the 2/3 required vote next year.
:Given that people are going to treat the seven principles as a creed anyway and that a change to them would effect everybody at least in the sense that we'd need new bookmarks and RE materials, shouldn't we have more than a bunch of GA junkies voting for them?
Of course.
:Should there be a special rule that if you're going to change the seven principles, they need to be ratified by X percent of congregations?
Good point. In a sense it is comparable to other important changes such as changing the legal name of a U*U church. It seems that a vote garnering the approval of a clear majority is warranted for this situation and other similar situations so I will suggest that ratification by fully 66% aka two-thirds of U*U congregations should be required for this.
More later. . .
Believe it or not the WVC for this comment is gundown
Quite appropriate considering what happened to the proposed changes to UUA principles and purposes at the 2009 UUA GA. BTW I just LOVED it when former UUA Moderator Denny Davidoff made it clear that UUA GAs, and perhaps U*Uism more generally, are not *truly* democratic. I have been saying this for years, so it was wonderful validation when the chairperson of the UUA's Fifth Principle Task Force so bluntly asserted that GA votes etc. are not *truly* democratic.
Why do I get the feeling that no one listens to me?:
They have already announced that GA 2010 will be the last GA as we know it.
@ Kim -- they're talking about changing the format of the conference itself, but they can't make any significant changes to anything governed by the By-Laws without having delegates vote on those changes. The governance process as currently mandated and practiced is a separate issue from the format of GA as a whole, though they are of course related.
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