8 thoughts on “A debate in the UU subreddit over the 2017 hiring controversy.”

1. UPDATE: Another member named JAWVMM finally gave me what I asked for!

   {{{For a national research organization’s figures on ethinc/racial composition by denomination, see here:
   https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/27/the-most-and-least-racially-diverse-u-s-religious-groups/

   For the UUA -specific figures, see here
   https://www.uuworld.org/sites/live-new.uuworld.org/files/morales_staff_diversity_controversy_20170327.pdf }}}

   {{{Employment of Trustees

   A UUA employee may not approach a member of the Board of Trustees regarding possible employment on the UUA staff. Without prior approval of the Board, a trustee may not apply for or accept employment with the Association within one year after the end of the member’s service on the Board.
   https://www.uua.org/uuagovernance/manual/limits/appendices/183779.shtml
   It is my understanding that the Board allowed not one, but two, Trustees to apply for the position.}}}

   It is so annoying that AlmondSauce2 didn’t bother to do that from the start. Why am I one of the few that try to prove my points consistently?

   My first answer:
   {{{THANK YOU! That’s exactly what I was asking for! It is infuriating that people keep asserting questionable stats without backing them up with clear documentation. NEVER assume something is already common knowledge!

   [[A UUA employee may not approach a member of the Board of Trustees regarding possible employment on the UUA staff. Without prior approval of the Board, a trustee may not apply for or accept employment with the Association within one year after the end of the member’s service on the Board.]]

   Click to access GadflyReview2.pdf

   [[The Southern Region Lead was a “plum” position, which drew multiple applicants. Among them were two sitting members of the UUA Board of Trustees…. According to UUA policy, ​neither ​should have been eligible without full Board of Trustees approval. UUA Board members were supposed to be off the Board for a year beforeemployment as UUA staff, to avoid conflict of interest. UUA Director of Congregational Life, Rev. Scott Tayler, who ultimately made the hire, solicited an agreement with Moderator (Board Chair,) Jim Key, to waive that policy for this hire. The full Board was not informed until after the fact, and there was never a proper vote to suspend the rule.

   Eklof also does not mention that one term of employment was, logically enough, for the successful applicant to be located in, or at least near, the Southern Region. Furthermore, in the interview process, ​multiple ​applicants left their interviews feeling as though they had secured the position. This was inexcusable clumsiness on Tayler’s part, and invited thecontroversy that followed. Eklof mentions only one, the “Latina,” but other candidates were also given the same impression. Thus, flawed process pretty much guaranteed bitter feelings.Eklof also fails to mention that Rev. Andy Burnette, the person Rev. Scott Tayler chose,lived far away from the Southern Region, in Phoenix, Arizona. What’s more, after choosing Burnette, ​Tayler agreed to Burnette remaining in Phoenix, even though it was two states awayfrom the nearest Congregation he would be advising—and thousands of miles from most of them! ​Logistics (and expense pertaining thereto) aside, it should have been obvious this decision would provoke resentment and controversy.]]

   My conclusion: NONE of that crap should have happened! And both Rev. Scott Tayler and Jim Key should have been FIRED over this. Rev. Andy Burnette should never have been considered for the position and someone else actually living in the region (not necessarily the “Latina” UUA trustee in question) should have been chosen, period. But the “good ol’ boy” system worked to mess things up.

   As I said before, Rev. Peter Morales didn’t have to resign because that did not help matters. He could have said nothing in public about the matter until the GA that year and brought together ALL of the people involved in the controversy to sit down face to face and work things out. His failure to do so damaged the UUA and ruined his own legacy.}}}

   Reply

   • Continuing….

     {{{JAWVMM

     Thank you. I always try to give sources when I make factual statements, and am glad to try to find them for others. I agree that the entire process was a problem. Board members should not have been considered, and it seemed clear at the time that the process was a mess. The problem as I saw it was that, instead of going back to the people responsible, it was taken straight to social media and to religious professionals all over the country. I saw it as a classic case of triangulation – which I learned about in UUA leadership training, and it comes from family systems theory which is taught in seminary. (Triangulation is when person A has a problem with person B, but goes to person C to get them to talk to person B. In churches and other organizations, it also takes the form of someone gathering a group of people to pressure person B.)

     I think the facts about the racial balance in UUA staff, and particularly the improvements over Morales’s term, argue against the idea that hiring was systematically racially biased. The process was a mess, but I don’t think it was race.

     And I can’t agree with

     [[By default, members of races favor their own kind, so in a group with a white majority, a white person would naturally be picked for an open position of leadership 99 times out of 100. The only way to change that is to publicly SHAME those that are unconsciously biased, and thus open their eyes and force them to stop being blind to their own self-imposed ignorance.]]

     Shaming is not only not the only way, it doesn’t get good results, and it is wrong, too boot.

     [[Neither of them were EXPELLED and SHUNNED by all other UUs for what they expressed in public.]]

     Pine was the subject of a widely circulated vile YouTube rant by a person who is now a UUA Board member. Rev. Eklof was censured by UUMA, which does threaten his vocation and livelihood. We as UUs, and parts of the larger culture, operate on a double standard. Until we can learn that nobody deserves to be sworn at, dismissed, disrespected, or shamed, we haven’t grasped the Principles.}}}

     {{{Seeker_Alpha1701

     I respect your position. At least you gave me honest and clear dialogue here, unlike some people I have encountered over the past two years that come across as arrogant pricks.

     The UUA, and UU churches all over the world, need to focus not only on eliminating white supremacy, but also teach both kids and adults how to argue with clear facts, documentation and consistent logic and stop with the fallacies I see way too often! I think they carry that tendency over from whatever religious backgrounds they came from, where assertions and personal biases rule the order of discussions. We UUs must do better.}}}

     {{{JAWVMM

     Again, I agree. One thing that distresses me is that I think the way the white supremacy claims are framed, and a whole spectrum of issues around multiculturalism are based on faulty logic and cherry-picking. ANd I don’t think religion has as much to do with it as a lot of built-in bias in the way people think. Another thing that I am distressed about is that we really are not working at being empathetic/compassionate with everyone, and especially are constantly questioning people’s motives and sincerity.}}}

     {{{JAWVMM

     I don’t know where the idea that Eklof is in any way saying “you condemn my racial biases, therefore you threaten my freedom”came from, but it is not at all where he is coming from. The stats on UUA hiring I posted elsewhere; to condemn the UUA as white supremacist is to condemn its leadership, which includes a Hispanic President and a black President before him.

     Free copy of the book here. Do him the courtesy of reading it before condemning him. https://gofile.io/?c=AguF0k }}}

     {{{Seeker_Alpha1701

     [[to condemn the UUA as white supremacist is to condemn its leadership, which includes a Hispanic President and a black President before him.]]

     That’s a good point. William Sinkford, the Black UUA President you mentioned, took part in the Black Empowerment controversy within the UUA in the late 1960s, and actually left it for a while when he didn’t get what he wanted from it. He eventually returned, served as UUA President, was made a UUA co-President after Peter Morales resigned, and with two others made changes. He was exactly the person I expected and wanted to take charge until the next GA.

     Barack Obama served as the first Black President of the United States, but did almost nothing to break down the white supremacy still infesting the federal government and American society in general, as shown by the election of Donald Trump, himself a racist, to be Obama’s successor. Too many white men still thought of the US Presidency as for THEM ONLY.

     I don’t want a future leader of the UUA to be our version of Donald Trump….and that’s exactly how I viewed Rev. Eklof.
     I have downloaded his book and will study its contents, finally! This should have been made available to me a long time ago!}}}

     Reply

     • {{{JAWVMM

       I’m not going to read and critique the whole thing, but just a page or two in, there is this “I doubt most modern historians would deny that the First Amendment was conceived by men who passionately believed in white supremacist hierarchy” which I think exemplifies the kind of thinking that has gotten us to the polarized and untenable situation we are in. First, it is a guilt by association (ad hominem) attack – like the attacks on reason by the UUMA (derived from postmodernism and critical race theory). Even if the founders were white supremacists, and the defenders and interpreters were mostly white men, it does not follow that therefore the principle of free speech is wrong. But the larger problem is the frame that white supremacy pre-existed the European settlement of North America and was a central principle and motive. I think most modern historians would deny that Madison and others responsible for the Bill of Rights were passionate white supremacists (see for example this essay on Madison and racism: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/28/opinion/sunday/james-madison-racism.html ). We tend to have views that vastly simplify history and people’s motives, and also not to have a grasp of what actually happened in the past. We then attribute intentionality, and even conspiracy, where there is none. I am aware of the tenet that intention doesn’t matter, but we follow that at our peril, because our responses to protect ourselves from intentional harm should, practically, be very different from our responses to unintentional harm.}}}

       {{{Seeker_Alpha1701
       [[ like the attacks on reason by the UUMA (derived from postmodernism and critical race theory).]]

       I wasn’t aware that “reason” as a means of figuring out truth and justice was being denied by anyone in the UUA. Really???

       [[ Even if the founders were white supremacists, and the defenders and interpreters were mostly white men, it does not follow that therefore the principle of free speech is wrong.]]

       It was my understanding that it was the very principle of “free speech” that was being used by critics of the UUA hiring practices of 2017. And later by critics of a flawed article in the UU World about transgender issues.

       People who are criticized about such matters may be commended for being willing to listen to critics and to either defend their actions and positions with logic and facts or to change if the need to do so is understood. Including myself. If I am proven wrong about something, I own up to it and don’t defend a previous position. I don’t whine about being criticized like a wimp!

       And yet…..

       [[ “I must say what I believe is true and do what I believe is right, even if I’m wrong…”]]

       NO, Rev. Eklof, you should say:

       [[ “I must say what I believe is true and do what I believe is right, unless and until I am proven wrong…..”]]

       You cannot be trusted if you are not willing to listen and change, period! Both Eklof and Mel Pine can kiss my @$$ about this. They were wrong, period.}}}

       {{{JAWVMM
       From the UUMA censure letter “we cannot ignore the fact that logic has often been employed in white supremacy culture to stifle dissent, minimize expressions of harm, and to require those who suffer to prove the harm by that culture’s standards.”

       https://www.uuma.org/news/466020/UUMA-Board-and-Executive-Team-Issues-Public-Letter-of-Censure.htm }}}

       {{{Seeker_Alpha1701

       I understand. It seems the misuse of logic without using empathy and taking all facts into account instead of cherry picking to make a case you already assume to be true is the issue, not logic itself.

       For example, if I were a racist defending slavery in the early 19th Century, I would have used logic like this:

       “When we encountered the blacks in Africa, they were living a primitive lifestyle. Isn’t that proof enough that they are inferior to us highly civilized whites? That we should rule over them forever?”

       Uh, no. We should be judging people as INDIVIDUALS, not by their skin color or any other issue, period.

       Reason is not useless, but it is overrated, which is why Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is not acceptable to me. She was a damned racist against both Native Americans and Arabs. You can use twisted forms of “logic” to justify anything. Even genocide!}}}

       {{{JAWVMM

       [[We should be judging people as INDIVIDUALS, not by their skin color or any other issue, period.]]

       Absolutely. And what I don’t understand is how we can believe that, but also believe that it is ok to say “because you are a white man, you can’t possibly understand my point of view, and we have heard enough from white men, anyway.” Which is said, often.

       About the judging – we need to judge ideas, not people.}}}

       {{{Seeker_Alpha1701

       [[“because you are a white man, you can’t possibly understand my point of view, and we have heard enough from white men, anyway.”]]

       This white man would disagree. And if there are any UUs of any gender or that may or may not be non-white also that say such nonsense, let them be denounced as hypocrites.}}}

       {{{JAWVMM

       Well, I don’t think that anyone should be denounced, but plenty of UUs are saying that, in nastier words – white men are saying it to white men, for that matter. The other day a white male UU was saying it to another white male UU, who had said more or less apologetically that he was white and cis but also gay, disabled, and with depression – didn’t matter, he was a white man and “we have heard enough from white men.”}}}

       Reply

       • {{{JAWVMM

         [[“When we encountered the blacks in Africa, they were living a primitive lifestyle. Isn’t that proof enough that they are inferior to us highly civilized whites? That we should rule over them forever?”]]

         I think one of the problems with how we are looking at race and the problems it is still causing today is that we tend to simplify and generalize like this about how people thought about it then (and how they think about it now). I don’t think that people in the 19th c. thought that way, and by then, we were centuries past encountering Africans. The first slaves who arrived in Virginia in 1619 were on ships that had been captured by the English, not particularly for the slave cargo, and for a couple of generations, the relatively few slaves brought in were treated much like the white indentured servants. The whole system developed quite slowly over 250 years, in response to a whole lot of very local factors. Nobody went to Africa, said, oh look, primitive people we can kidnap for forced labor and build an empire. And by the Revolution, all of the Northern states had abolished slavery outright or passed laws to phase it out. I’m not arguing that Western Europeans didn’t feel they were superior to less technological cultures – with some justification – Eurasia had great geographical advantages over the Americas and Africa. We know now that the development of agriculture and the development of technology that it supports (broadly including writing, systems of thought, political organization) doesn’t depend on the character of the people, but on the available resources, like domesticable animals, climate, and broad areas of land in the same climate zones so crops can spread. People didn’t know that then (we didn’t figure it our until the second half of the 20th century), and without that information it was reasonable to assume that differences in people made the difference. Even so, there was a huge amount of discussion over the 17th and 18th centuries about the rightness of slavery and the place of Africans, native Americans, and everyone else fit in and were to be treated – and, at the time “race” was more a cultural idea than a physical one. Slavery in the South was partly or possibly completely an attempt to rebuilt feudalism – south Carolina’s original charter provided for a landed aristocracy, and although that was scrapped, South Carolina built was was essentially a landed aristocracy without the titles, and feudal. And that structure spread throughout the South. The whole thing was driven by economics. The economic structure of the northern economies was completely different, based on family farms, timber, fishing, and the fur trade, which rapidly became the deerskin trade (which was half of the South Carolina economy, too, until the 1760s). And of course, the skin trade was Native American trade – they were the suppliers and the French and English were middlemen, traders, not the hunters, something that you never hear in either the trafditional nor the revised American histories. That too developed over hundreds of years. And all of it was individual people, from dozens of European cultures, languages and backgrounds, from the very beginning, and all of those people were working with each other, in quite different local groups, for their own ends, not some grand scheme of empire and domination.

         I could go on but it is late. I think we really need to stop thinking about people as huge homogenous groups with nefarious purposes. We all feel pain, we all suffer, we are all going to die.}}}

         {{{Seeker_Alpha1701

         I still think that Rev. Eklof’s attempt to distribute free copies of his book at the 2019 GA without informing the organizers of the GA beforehand and inviting various parties involved to take part in a discussion about the issues in which all sides could be heard and responded to was unacceptable. Merely publishing the book and making it available for sale on Amazon is not a problem. But he made what looked like a sneak attack at the very GA his local UU community was hosting! You only do that when you are acting in bad faith.}}}

         {{{JAWVMM

         It is not as if books are never distributed at GA. It is one of the purposes of having an exhibit area. Why is it acting in bad faith? Should all books and other materials distributed from a congregation’s or other group’s table at GA be vetted before hand and discussion times arranged for them?}}}

         {{{Seeker_Alpha1701

         Well, I just think it would have been a courtesy for Rev. Eklof to inform the organizers about the book, set up a small booth to sell (not give away) copies of the book and let curious people come to that booth to ask about what he was selling and then decide for themselves if they wanted to buy it. NOT try to cram that book down anyone else’s throat! It was the specific tactics he used, not just the book itself that bothered me when I first heard about it. People who had no idea what they had just been given would read it, realize it was propaganda against the decisions made in 2017, and feel blindsided and attacked. That didn’t have to happen.}}}

         {{{JAWVMM

         I didn’t have the impression that anyone was making people take it. And he did set up a small booth – it was the congregation’s table. People were quite vocal about just the blurbs on the back cover. i think we really need to get past the idea that differing opinions are attacks. His book is by no means attacking (although he is not an eloquent writer and that alone makes it a painful read for me), and most of the people who objected to it hadn’t read, said they refused to read it, and warned others not to read it. The best UU thing I have seen on the harm of protecting people from harm is this, which was written a month before GA – prescient. http://bootsandblessings.blogspot.com/2019/05/recommitting-to-ethic-of-personal.html

         and the five-part “Love Song to Unitarian Universalism” that follows it.}}}

         Reply

2. Dl, y sm t njy pstng crtcsms bt rgnztns, bks, msc, nd thr thngs thr ppl hv crtd. t mks m thnk y r n xprt t crtng thngs whch r prfct. Wht s n xmpl f smthng y hv crtd whch s prfct? gd nswr t ths wld dmnstrt yr xprts.

   (Dale Husband: Since I have never claimed to be perfect or to have made anything perfect, your comment is as childish and useless as it gets. Go find some other place to be a troll in.)

   Reply

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