My two sessions yesterday afternoon were “Religious Rights vs. LGBT Civil Rights” and “We know what we’re ‘Against’, but what are we ‘For’?” The first was a total bust. The only information the presenter had prepared were several sheets of a paperboard detailing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. She prefaced the whole discussion by saying “If I get too bogged down in legal words, just stop me and ask for clarification.” She wasn’t kidding. I totally recognize that the fight for equality has to be waged on several levels, including the legal arena. However, discussing the de minimis clause of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 isn’t what I thought a discussion of Religious Rights would be. Instead it was a delineation of how these two laws can be used to allow religious zealots to be free to express their rights. No actual discussion of LGBT rights was included. Total bust.
The second session, “What are we ‘For’?”, was amazing. I got to the session a bit early and immediately began judging the presenters. My first impulse was “How are two club-kids from Manhattan going to help define a progressive vision for the future? This is probably their first excursion into ‘fly-over country’ and they’re probably ready to get the hell out. Do I really have anything in common with guys like this, other than shared enemies like Pat Robertson or Rev. Sheldon?”
Then someone behind me mentioned Transgendered Midgets, and I giggled.
The two guys are from a DC-based organization called the Center for Community Change that helps out low-income grassroots organizations to further their vision. Lots of people they work with feel stuck, not sure of how to take the next step, or even what the next step should be. They started a project to help these groups define a cohesive mission. The session I attended was an extension of that previous project onto a national scale to help all of us figure out what the hell we really want.
All in all it was an amazing session. We were given ballots with a list of values on them, values like Religion, Hard Work, Profits, or Education. We were to choose our top 3 values and share that with the group. After we tallied our top values, our group came up with Community, Fairness and Equality. They said that of the 160 grass-roots groups they’ve surveyed so far, community is always one of the top vote-getters.
Then we divided into three groups, all with one umbrella issue. My group had “Family Recognition”, while the others had “Immigration” and “Alleviating Poverty”. We were to list our own perspectives or policies on these umbrella issues. Then we attached the values we assign to these policy decisions, and discussed why we thought those values didn’t apply to the other policy decisions. I know, it’s convoluted, and it was even harder in practice. Trying to argue that Equal Opportunity is an Inherent Right and not a reason for Marriage is very difficult. My group was largely young people from colleges. I was seriously inspired by their enthusiasm, especially since i’m only 10 years older than them. As a result, our discussion centered around the marriage/civil union debate. I tried to push towards other topics like Adoption, Surrogate Parenting, Equal Opportunity for Education, but these always seemed to be pushed aside for the larger idea of Inherent Rights. In the end, we didn’t decide anything. It really highlighted for me the incredibly hard task of deciding what we’re For. What am I for? What change am I trying to create?
The other groups had equal amounts of trouble. The immigration group decided that the best, most progressive vision was completely Open Borders. No nations, no walls, we’re all citizens of the world. They even listed Security as one of the values that led them to this choice. To the other groups, we obviously questioned how Open Borders would improve Security. They stated that they were mainly thinking about security on a local level, secure in their schools, secure in their homes, etc. I thought, “Yeah, locally, people in Iraq aren’t feeling very secure right now. Might want to re-think that.”
The Poverty Alleviation group had an even tougher time. Their discussion always came back to the value of Hard Work, which didn’t even make our Top 3 at the beginning of the session. They realized that even though things like Hard Work and Individual Responsibility are the defining values of alleviating poverty, the main solutions they would come up with centered around Collective Responsibility, a much more Socialist construct. I think embracing Socialist ideas is becoming more popular amongst activists, since the stigma of a Red Soviet Amerika isn’t quite a danger anymore.
They left us with two questions to ask ourselves.
1) Is it easy to think about values?
2) How easy is it to fall into other people’s frames of reference?
It wasn’t easy to think about values, and even harder to try to prioritize them. And it was very easy to fall into other people’s frames of reference. We were constantly refusing certain policy ideas or goals because of their taboo nature, or because they didn’t fit with current cultural “norms”. Not a good way to define a vision.
Tags: sessions