What Would Julia Do?

A sermon given at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Santa Fe
by Charlie Clements, M.D.,
President, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
November 7, 2004

Now that you’ve heard the title of my sermon, you’ll have to stay tuned for a while to figure out who Julia is.

Lately I’ve heard people talking about leaving the U.S.A. Someone yesterday told me a website about immigration to Canada that was receiving enormous numbers of hits. Yesterday I heard someone say that they had ‘had it’ with electoral politics… it was time to drop out. I met a college student the other day that wasn’t sure she could continue the semester she was so dispirited. An older man told me that maybe it was time to pass the torch. Many of us that worked on the election are worn out. Many who voted are discouraged. I’ll bet there isn’t a person in this room who isn’t relieved that the incessant television and radio ads with their distortions and accusations are over.

Let me make a few general comments about the election…perhaps clear up some misperceptions. We always need someone to blame, when we lose an election. This year it is the throngs of homophobic, evangelical Americans living in red states who were also motivated to vote by their opposition to abortion and stem cell research.

However, there was NO disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. They made up the same percentage of the electorate as they did in 2000. Just 8% of all voters said they were interested in a candidate with strong religious faith.

There was no increase in the percentage of voters who were pro-life. Fifty-five percent of all voters said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Only sixteen percent said it should be illegal in all cases.

Sixty percent of all voters said they approved either same sex marriage (25%) or civil unions (35%). Bush did NOT gain significantly in the states where there was a same-sex marriage initiative.

Bush won the election because he did better in 45 states than he did in 2000. He did better in Connecticut, New York…even Massachusetts. That’s hardly the Bible belt.

I think he was re-elected in large part because we are at war. A war-time president has never lost a re-election. Bush was re-elected because people are scared and he certainly manipulated their fears about terrorism.

A slim, but important margin of Americans felt Bush could fight terrorism better than Kerry…bottom line…they for the most part feel safer now than they did after 9-11. That’s a policy decision not fundamentalism.

This election was very close. Had 70,000 voters in Ohio voted differently, Kerry would have won the presidency even though George Bush would have had a several million vote plurality.

Does this mean that the Democrats are condemned to permanent minority status? No. The religious right - not to be confused with religious Americans in general - isn't a majority, or even a dominant minority. It's just one bloc of voters, whom the Republican Party has learned to mobilize. And yes, they used wedge issues like this year's polarizing debate over gay marriage.

It does not help us to think of America as ‘we’ and ‘they.’ Many people in states that used to vote Democratic said they feel alienated from a party which seems to look down upon them, which cannot relate to their fears and concerns, which seems to ridicule their faith.

It is interesting to me that as large as the tent is that we have created to worship under as UUs, we haven’t figured out how to do political diversity. I recently asked a UU minister in New Hampshire if there were any UUs in his congregation. He said perhaps four, maybe six and then confessed he’s the only one who knows because they are afraid to speak up. How sad?

We’ve lost the art of dialogue at the national level and at the local level. Why not take this defeat as an opportunity to engage in dialogue with some people who voted for Bush? Many UUs tell me they don’t know anyone who describes himself or herself as a Republican. What does that tell us that they know about us? Are we caricatures for them like they are for us.

Now that I’ve dispelled a few misperceptions about the elections, I would like to talk about your feelings and those I’ve been hearing friends describe.

How many of you are familiar with Julia Ward Howe? That’s right she was that spunky woman, a Unitarian, who helped bring women the vote. She was the founder of the New England Women’s Association, which was one of the first regional organizations to work on women’s suffrage. Julia Ward Howe was tireless but managed to meet defeat after defeat with determination.

Did she contemplate moving to Canada? Did she contemplate dropping out? Did she contemplate leaving it to a younger generation? The answers are, of course, no, no, and no. She fought tirelessly for women’s suffrage but died ten years before women got the vote. She should be an inspiration to us.

So I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m in Santa Fe. I’ll just channel Julia and see what she has to say.” Christians these days, often ask, “What would Jesus do?” I wanted to know “What would Julia do?”...hence the title. So I thought I would ask her.

Reaching her was a little difficult because there were so many people trying to get on the line, but I finally got through. First thing, she said was, “Charlie, I want you to congratulate those 22 congregations in New Hampshire that changed the color of that state from red to blue. It was the only state that did so. I heard about their ‘Take the Pledge’ campaign, which encouraged every member of every church to find three new voters to take down to the town clerk to register and then make sure on November that they took them to the polls.”

This work had to be done in a non-partisan manner, since they were working under the umbrellas of UUSC’s ‘Defending Democracy’ and UUA’s ‘Faithful Democracy.’

One of the first things they did was create a website, because they were short of phones and short of people to answer questions about where they were needed. It didn’t get much action in the beginning…this effort only started just after G.A. in July. But by October that website was hot especially when the ‘ Phabulous Phoning Initiative’ got underway.

Their research showed them that single mothers who hadn’t previously voted and college students were most likely to vote Democratic. So that’s where they focused their efforts.

It was based upon the fact that they were FINALLY able to buy a list of
unregistered women for SOME towns. They had been trying for months to no avail.

“You know,” Julia said, “that really made me proud. Many of those women are the great grand daughters and great nieces of the women who marched with me, who stood in the rain, who were beaten and arrested for merely speaking our truth that women should have the right to vote. Something in the system had discouraged them and those UUs in New Hampshire said, ‘Not on our watch.’”

Many town coordinators requested lists, but when the box arrived on October 28th, it included no names for some towns, and literally thousands of names in Wilton, Franklin, Exeter, Peterborough, Jaffrey, Plymouth and small towns near Plymouth. The stunner was 228 pages or 1800 phone calls to the 6 wards in Laconia! In the last few DAYS before the election they made THOUSANDS of phone calls to inform unregistered women how to register and vote. What they ended up doing was taking the cities that requested phone lists and pairing them as much as possible, with the cities overloaded with calls. So, for example, Portsmouth took and phoned half of Plymouth.

The special case was Laconia! They managed to distribute and
call, all but 48 (all but 6 out of 228 pages!) of those over 1800 calls to
Laconia!--While Laconia UU Congregation itself took one and a half wards ( A woman who arrived at the church for the first time on Sunday, October 31st and took a script that covered half a ward or about 150 calls.) UUs over the border in Massachusetts from the Belmont, MA and Concord, MA churches, took most of the rest! The Belmont minister Edmund Robinson, who innocently volunteered to be on call as a legal advisor, but took on this challenge and in two days fourteen Belmont volunteers made over 400 calls.

When they ran out of bodies and phone in New Hampshire, the website allowed them to reach out to ‘outlanders.’ There were a dozen or more individual UUs and friends who volunteered from as far away as Virginia. The lists were faxed to them and they phoned and then faxed back the results, all calling Laconia Ward 1!

Two women from out-of-state said, “we can do more,” so they even took
additional lists of people who had been identified by canvassing door to door in Manchester and called them in the last two hours of election day before the polls closed!

One woman told a wonderful story about encouraging and persuading a 94 year
old woman to register and vote!! At that Julia gasped, “She would have been born in 1910, the year I died, and imagine, she had never voted.”

Julia said, “I was inspired by those stunning, inspiring Holly Near concerts and in Franklin and Cambridge. If Holly been there to help us, women might have gotten the vote a decade earlier…maybe I could have even voted in my lifetime!”

So what was the result of all of this? Well New Hampshire, which Bush had won by 7,000 votes in 2000 was won by Kerry in 2004 by 10,000 votes. Can the UUs take credit? Of course not, but they worked with many like minded people and organizations to do outreach to encourage people to register at community suppers and homeless shelters--(many UU churches) such as Concord, Peterborough, Laconia, Chocurua hosted their own dinners). They had some help from a young AFSC organizer and used materials developed by a Quaker housing/homelessness organizer.

Keene was the one university town where the UU initiative made a MAJOR impact. They ran a tabling operation in the student center FIVE days a week,(beginning in mid September) doing voter counseling to counteract a mis-information campaign that was designed to repress the student vote. Students were told by NH officials that if they had to become NH residents and get drivers licenses or face prosecution if they tried to register and vote – it simply wasn’t true. Someone didn’t want them voting this year. The UU congregation in Keene worked with campus ministry and even talked the city clerk into coming down every Friday. They registered over 1000 students!

Julia was caught by surprise when I told her that my sermon could only last twenty minutes unlike services around the turn of the century, which could last for several hours.

“I understand you only stay in church an hour these days,” she said, “but I do want to mention that one of my inspirations was Theodore Parker whose best sermon lasted 2 ½ hours. Some were even longer. Times have changed and I don’t want to disrespect your quaint customs.”

The other day in Lima, Peru a taxi driver told a friend of mine, “Everybody in the world should be able to vote in your elections since your government controls what happens in the world……¨

The global majority are not unlike many of the women Julia was trying to organize around the turn of the last century, who were largely without voice. Living at poverty or below. Unrepresented by political parties or incumbent governments. The global majority is working to survive, uneducated, without political power, and without voice.

We should regard them as our allies who deserve to be heard, to be included in the division of the global pie, globalization´s dispossessed.

Give them all the vote. Send the exit poll experts into the field. Conduct some exit interviews when workers leave the gold mines, the sugar cane plantations, the textile sweat shops, the high tech assembly lines, and the subsistence farm’s waterless plot of land. Ask the global majority whether they favor tax cuts or education, abstinence or family planning. Ask the surviving family members of innocents killed by precision smart bombs or car bombs if they favor more war like the massive assault about to begin on Fallujah or do they support negotiation and mediation that could lead to an American exit from Iraq.

Give them each a vote, give them all a vote, expand democracy, build democratic institutions, expand the franchise. Include the immigrant workers forced to leave their barren land, their captured markets, and their families to cross armed borders as economic refugees.

Since they can’t vote, convince your dispirited colleagues to link arms, keep marching, and pretend they are voting for them. Yes, the forces arrayed against us won a short term victory…but it was only that. They will not rest, but they will feel safe in their victory. We cannot rest, the global majority never rests, the working people only dream of rest.

We will not rest. We will not mourn this election result. John Kerry may rest. The Democratic party may retreat to its reduced seats in the Congress, but the global majority is not allowed to rest, they look to us in the US as their hope, their eyes, their voice. Push the media to hear the voice, promote the stories of the global majority, reach out to people of faith who voted for Bush and challenge them to understand the perspective of the global majority who now so disdain and resent American arrogance.

Take strength from defeat. Understand the forces of power. Open our veins to the infusion of human resilience, commitment, and vision that carries noble visions forward regardless of temporary impediment. Misfortune compels adaptation and shapes our conduct to more precise and focused application.

Yes, the 2004 presidential election results weren’t what you had hoped. You are let down, disappointed, dejected, tired, spent, but the sweat and blood of our toil so minor by comparison to that of the global majority sweating and toiling day to day. No respite for the salt of the earth, no post election day let down, just more hard work, hot days, low pay, no pay, no hope, no say.

We are part of a historical process. Celebrate life, take strength from the connections made, the hard work undertaken, and the power of your convictions. Tomorrow will bring an unforeseen return, a new ally, awareness of the challenge and opportunity ahead.

People today often credit Martin Luther King with the expression that the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice, but those words were first heard from the pulpit of my friend, Reverend Theodore Parker. He was the Unitarian minister who led the Boston opposition to the fugitive slave act, which others said slavery was sanctioned by scriptures. He was indicted by a federal grand jury for harboring escaped slaves in his home.

He would tell us that the time it will take us to address issues of injustice is exactly equal to our lifespan. As the flower slowly turns toward the sun, in the long term, history bends toward justice and the arc of the universe toward life.

**I want to acknowledge that I drew some portions of this sermon about the global majority sermon from thoughts of my dear friend and co-conspirator Bill Monning, who recently wrote to me from Peru and from a long letter from Pam Kelly describing what transpired in NH’s ‘Faithful Democracy Campaign.’

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