"Preserving Democracy”    Nov. 5, 2017     Roger Ray, pastor   

   click here to see the video            

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” — H. L. Mencken

One year prior to the 2018 mid-term elections, registered voters in Missouri received this postcard in the mail telling them that the next time they go to the polls that they will have to show a government issued photo-id. For those of us who drive cars, this is not likely to be much of a personal affront. If you own a car you have a driver’s license that is always on your person anyway so it won’t noticeably slow you down at the polls.

The larger issue here is voter suppression. The formula is very simple: large voter turnout favors Democrats and low voter turnout favors Republicans. In a true democracy, everyone gets to vote. Who is everyone? In the early days of our nation, “everyone” meant “white men.” In 1870, after the Civil War, black men were granted the right to vote though most southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, and other measures to suppress any actual voting by the black population of their states.

Fifty years after black men were given the vote, after years of protests and demonstrations that were often broken up with violence and multiple arrests, women were granted the right to vote in 1920, when our nation was already 150 years old. Voter suppression, especially of black voters, continued right up until the famous protests of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, culminating in the 1965 passage of the Voter Rights Act.

Most of us here today can remember the historic events on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and the Bloody Sunday in March of 1965 when the police literally opened fire on protestors, state police rode horses into the crowd, indiscriminately beating demonstrators.

It took almost two hundred years to actually give birth to a democracy where everyone could vote. People worked, bled, and died to gain this right to participate in self-governance. I understand that Republicans still want to win elections but they don’t get to win by eroding democracy. They need to develop policies and conduct campaigns that win the most votes. The claim of voter fraud is, itself, a fraud.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, conducted a research project to find out how many instances of voter fraud have taken place in US elections. Donald Trump claimed that there were millions of instances of voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election but Levitt’s research turned up only 31 credible cases of voter fraud in all elections, nation-wide, from 2000 to 2014. Folks, that’s between two and three instances of voter fraud per year in all 50 states. And even if his research missed a thousand times as many as he found, you still wouldn’t have enough votes to affect a national election.

There are no real incidents of voter fraud. Still, states are enacting photo ID laws to solve a problem that does not exist. Who does not have a government issued photo ID? People who don’t own cars: the poor, minorities, the disabled, recent immigrants, and urban dwellers. More than 20 million registered voters do not have a photo ID, 20 million people who just happen to fit the demographic of typical Democratic voters.

We’re good people. We are not narcissistically only interested in what affects us directly. We are, or we should be, outraged by anyone’s right to vote being either taken from them or even just seeing millions manipulated into not bothering to jump through the hoops necessary to vote. But let’s imagine for a moment that we are not good people. Selfishly speaking, does voter suppression affect those of us who do have a driver’s license in our pockets at all times? Of course it does, especially if you believe in democracy, if you value our form of government, if you believe in majority rule, and, in fact, if you ever want someone other than a Republican candidate to win.

When 20 million voters who might vote for a progressive candidate are prevented from voting, then my vote is worth significantly less. I care about voter’s rights because they were bought with a price, one-person, one-vote is the bedrock of freedom and democracy and any attempt at diluting democracy is an assault on any patriotic American. It is heartbreaking to think that any political party would stoop so low as to assault the integrity of voting in order to win more elections.

Let me bring this issue down to a concrete application: The state of Wisconsin was one of the first to enact photo ID laws, preventing more than 50,000 citizens from voting in 2016. Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin by 23,000 votes. It is likely that without the photo ID law, Trump would not have won in Wisconsin and without Wisconsin, he would not have been elected president. So, I hope you can see how important that this issue is.

But, of course, the photo-id requirements is only one way that Republicans are seeking to suppress voter’s rights. They are trying to close voting places, make lines longer, restrict early voting and eliminate weekend voting.

Other nations make election day a national holiday so that everyone is off from work. In America, we always vote on a Tuesday, a work day, so that business owners, managers, the retired, and professionals have no trouble getting to the polls, but hourly workers cannot. If we moved our election days to a Saturday or a Sunday, it would be much more democratic but you almost never hear that idea even being mentioned.

But all of these techniques pale in significance to the real crime of voter fraud: Gerrymandering. This practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts to benefit the party that is in power is now over 200 years old. However, with the advent of digital record keeping and the massive data we have on voters and their addresses, Gerrymandering has reached a new zenith.

Both Republicans and Democrats have been guilty of doing it but as the percentage of the population that self identifies as Republicans grows smaller, the remaining Republican controlled state houses are rigging elections far into the future by twisting and turning electoral district lines for no logical reason so far as common interests goes but very intentionally to establish majority Republican districts that can hold onto power for another generation.

Electoral districts are defined on the state level but they affect national elections. It is legal but it shouldn’t be. It amounts, once again, to taking away, not an individual’s right to vote but rather it renders the votes of more than 40% of our citizens, worthless. I don’t want to sound wonkish about this so let me say it simply: If you love democracy, you automatically hate gerrymandering.

And speaking of being wonkish, let me tax your patience for just another five minutes to talk about something that usually goes entirely ignored for four years at a time until we set out to elect a new president. Our founding fathers, for reasons that were fairly disingenuous in the 1770’s but have become absolutely absurd since the invention of the telegraph, built a monster into our constitution called “the electoral college.”

Article 2, section 1, clause 2 creates a way of assigning each state a certain number of electoral college votes based on the population of each state. Originally it provided an extra layer of protection against a direct, one person, one vote, election in which a gullible public might do what H. L. Menken feared, the public could elect an absolute moron. Now that we have elected an absolute moron, even with the Electoral College in place, we need to give it another look.

What is not in the constitution is any suggestion that any state has to award all of their electoral college votes to any one candidate. For example, in the last election, Missouri was allowed 10 electoral college votes. If 60% of the votes cast in Missouri went to Trump, and 40% went to Clinton, then it stands to reason that Trump would get 6 of our votes and Clinton would get 4. Nothing could be more obvious.

It is obvious except for the fact that states don’t do it that way. Most are winner take all. So if you are a democrat in a red state, your presidential vote is worthless before you go to the polls because our president is not elected based on the popular vote. Voting for democrats in deeply red states is a symbolic protest but it has no impact on the election.

It would take an amendment to the constitution to eliminate the electoral college but amendments are almost impossible to pass. But that doesn’t mean that we are stuck with the electoral college. Either a Supreme Court decision or the Congress could mandate that states apportion electoral college delegates based on a proportion of the vote totals…. Creating election by popular vote… sort like is done in every other civilized nation in the world.

The premise of this book is that most of what stands between the America we are now and the greater America we long for just isn’t all that hard to accomplish. Crucial to the preservation of our free democracy is the right of every citizen to vote. We need to encourage everyone to vote their conscience and we need to outlaw gerrymandering and the winner-take-all state practices regarding the electoral college, and these silly voter ID laws that are just another form of poll tax or literacy tests should be eliminated. And we should make voting easier with mail-in ballots, weekend voting, and easier absentee voting, and our election day should be a national holiday.

I would love to get big money out of politics. I would love for us to have enforced campaign periods of no more than three months, and I would love to see prison sentences for candidates who knowingly lie in campaign speeches and ads. Most western democracies already have these practices in place but each of these would be rather more difficult for us to accomplish. “Difficult” doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done but, as I have said, the point of this book is to encourage Americans to grab the low hanging fruit of reform immediately.

Progressives should never surrender to despair. American greatness is within our grasp.

“Spiritual but not Religious…”    Oct. 29, 2017    Dr. Roger Ray

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Matthew 22:34-46                              When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?"

He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

    Bill Nye, a.k.a. “The Science Guy” has added his voice to the chorus of genetic scientists who insist that race is a human construct. As he said, if someone from Papua New Guiana has a child with someone from Sweden, their child is a human. Looked at from a perspective of DNA, there really is no such thing as African, Asian, Native American, Latino, Caucasian, or Eskimo. The differences among humans are subtle and insignificant.

I don’t get to talk about philosophy very often and I’m sure most of you can count your lucky stars for that but there was one philosopher that I studied in college that didn’t make much sense to me at the time who has come to make a lot more sense to me in recent years.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was a British and Austrian philosopher who talked about the philosophy of mind and of language. I remember my professor explaining his existential argument by saying that if you look down at a table that you are not seeing the same table you would see if you looked at it from beneath it. That hardly seemed like it was worth the price of tuition but the real point of it is, the truth of a thing depends entirely upon the perspective from which you see it. And you know me, I’m all about evidence based faith and I like to root my reality in scientific facts but perspective is a huge determinant in what truth you experience.

It is true that there is, from the perspective of science, no such thing as race. We are all humans but if you ask a black person if there is such a thing as blackness, that is, has growing up being identified as a black person had any influence on you?  Well, their reality is not the reality that Bill Nye is talking about. White privilege is real, minority prejudice is real, gender discrimination is real, and while scientists may be trying to defuse the assumptions our society has accumulated around race, the fact is, race is still real. Maybe not from a scientific perspective, but from a lived, realized, social perspective, it is very real.

We are all decent people here. None of us want to be racists. All of us would like to eradicate racism from our society and I believe that we have made progress in lots of ways but there is a great deal more progress to take place. When the Black Lives Matter movement began there were a lot of us, good, well-intended people, who made stumbling and somewhat confused responses to say “all lives matter.” Even Bernie Sanders, when he was first being confronted by Black Lives Matter protestors, said exactly those words, “all lives matter.” Bernie is a Jewish liberal in Washington, D.C., being in a minority is not new territory to him, but even a seasoned, progressive liberal who had marched in Civil Rights demonstrations back in the old days, still couldn’t see the table from the black side of the street.

The truth is that there has never been a time in modern American history when it wasn’t obvious that white lives matter. We have a long history of institutionally and individually insisting that black lives do not matter. And so the alternative needs to be said. And those of us who believe that we are “woke” to this issue, even those of us who are in inter-racial families, need to calm down and listen, ask more questions than we offer opinions, and see if we can grow our way out of racism.

Not since the days of the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 has the issue of sexual harassment been in the news since the case of Harvey Weinstein gained media attention. Sex scandals are not at all uncommon in the past generation but the coercion of sex from women by powerful men has been an especially nauseating bit of news. It is not hard to imagine that there were not a lot of applicants of women wanting to date Harvey for his natural good looks but his use of money and power to force himself into the lives of women has been especially disgusting, along the lines of the whole Bill Cosby case.

Still, I have to admit that I have a negative gut reaction to hearing people like George H. W. Bush being lumped together with the likes of Cosby and Weinstein. When a man in his 90’s who is confined to a wheelchair gives himself permission to inappropriately touch women who are standing close to his chair, I’m willing to insist that the difference between a confused, sick, old man and the kind of predator that we have seen from younger and more aggressive people in power . . . but I am not a young woman who has been groped. I have an opinion, but this is not a time to listen to the opinions of old, white, men. We need to listen to women who have been victimized.

And, yes, especially as a younger pastor, I can tell you that I have been groped by little old ladies during my nursing home visits. There was one little lady at my former parish who came through the greeting line at the end of the service every week and would reach around behind me for a squeeze and after a while she started coming through for a handful and then going to the back of the line and coming through a second and third time. It was annoying, but I knew that she was suffering from dementia and, folks, it is different for men. I didn’t feel objectified. I wasn’t afraid of assault. I didn’t feel that my credibility was in question.

I am aware that men can be sexually assaulted and I know that an alarming number of boys have suffered the worst kinds of sexual assault and humiliation, but what I am specifically saying here is that while there may be a huge difference between what George Bush did and what Harvey Weinstein did, it is time for men to be quiet and listen . . . we might learn something on this topic if we will wait to hear what the table looks like from another perspective.

I am aware that there are also false allegations and there are people who are trying to make their reputations by making claims of victimization but if you lead off with that reply, you are telling legitimate victims to remain silent because they will not be believed. I get called into these conversations at times, especially when the offense takes place within a family and I know how dangerous it is to give credence to a false allegation. I know how delicate a thing that a reputation is but our first response needs to be affirmative. We need to believe the people who come forward with complaints before the list gets to be as long as it was with Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein.

Weinstein even insisted that he deserved a second chance. He has settled out of court in 8 different cases! What does he mean by a second chance? He has had a second, third, and fourth chance and quite a few more after that . . . and that was the reported cases. I think we’re looking for a prison with no exit in his case.

Still, I find myself changing the channel or skipping a podcast when this story comes on. I feel that I have heard enough and with Congress set to shift another huge portion of the tax burden onto the backs of the poor and middle class to give even more tax favoritism to the super wealthy, and with our President still threatening to get us into a nuclear exchange with North Korea and maybe even Iran, stories about men behaving like pigs just doesn’t get to take up all of the news cycle.

But, as Winston Churchill said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; and courage is what it also takes to sit down and listen.” We progressives are a lot better at speaking than we are at listening. Most of us spent most of our lives being silenced by employers, parents, pastors, and schools. We spent most of our education learning how to stand in line and how to color inside of the lines and when we finally broke loose, and learned how to get out of line, how to color without lines, we lost an appropriate sense of balance.

You cannot accurately describe the world only from your perspective. The universe does not revolve around your navel. We like to say that we are spiritual and not religious. We like to say that love is our religion. And our collective rejection of creeds, dogmas, and institutional authority has been vital to our liberation but on this week when we observe the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing of the 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, for all of the freedom and independent thinking and scholarship that was born in that Reformation, there were also an uncountable number of wars, factions, heresies and abuses. The Catholic church was and is guilty of any number of abuses but have you ever heard of the Assemblies of God?  The Mormons?  The Church of Christ? Do you know what the Jehovah’s Witnesses have put people through?

I appreciate the fact that the Unitarian Universalists have commonly taken up this theme in many of their congregations. But it has to be more than a slogan. In the well known passage from the 22^nd chapter of Matthew that we used as our wisdom lesson today; Jesus is reported to have said that the greatest commandment is to love God and the second is like it, that we love one another. I’m in no position to edit Jesus but since I’m pretty sure that Matthew edited him, I’m going to give it a stab.

I’m going to insist that the two commandments are really just one. Think about it, what does it mean to love God? If you stop there, full-stop, period, just love God, that doesn’t mean a thing. The only way to love God is to love other people.

I can tell you that I am totally devoted to the Persian god, Ahura Mazda, but unless you know more about Zoroastrianism than I assume you do, that isn’t going to mean a thing to you. The only way to be sincerely spiritual, the only way to have a faith that has substance, is to literally be on the side of love and that will necessarily mean putting our own egos on hold now and then so that we can listen, learn, understand, empathize, and have real compassion for those around us.

Bill Nye is not technically wrong, from a scientific perspective. There is no race beyond our social constructs. And the world’s religions are all more full of balloon juice than they are substance and yet, the social reality we are living on the under side of the table is that there is still a lot of racism, sexual harassment is a nightmare, and people are still fighting and dying for their own version of an ancient religion that is still important to them.

I am proud to be among you. I am sincerely proud of your willingness to protest, demonstrate, write, speak, and advocate but I don’t want us to forget that love also demands that we listen, to see the table from another perspective, and to accept that our own views are not always either right or universal. That’s just my opinion, I’ll let you decide if I am right.