Still in the Dark

The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society. -- John F. Kennedy

In this week's Sift:

• Obama Disappoints on Secrecy. In two important cases, he has reaffirmed Bush's precedents rather than rejecting them.
• The Gathering Storm of Conservative Victimhood. A new ad shows how the Religious Right plans to oppose gay rights going forward. But the "rights" they claim to be losing were already rejected in Greensboro in 1960.
• Untruth and Consequences. If you report the truth and it sets off some violent whacko, that's not your fault. But if you set off the crazies by making stuff up, then maybe it is your fault.
• Short Notes. Why Palin will never be president. Ted's still got it at Fenway. Will Franken ever get to occupy the senate seat he won? It's official: protesters aren't terrorists. My limited sympathy for Ted Stevens. Tracking the decline of newspapers. How other countries handle criminal leaders. And the ultimate small car from GM and Segway.
  

  Obama Disappoints on Secrecy

The wars and the economy get all the headlines, but an equally important issue President Obama has inherited is executive power. The Bush administration put forward two principles (I'm stating them in my own words, but I believe I'm doing it fairly) that may sound reasonable individually, but taken together are very dangerous:

• By making the president commander-in-chief, the Constitution gives him the power to conduct a war without interference from the other branches of government.
• It is up to the president to decide (again without interference) what situations are part of an ongoing war.
  

Taken together, these principles imply that in wartime (and Congress has at least recognized and accepted that we are at war, even if war has never been formally declared), the president has unchecked power whenever he decides that he has unchecked power. It's a roadmap for dictatorship, no matter whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat.

Many of us have hoped that President Obama would announce a new doctrine of executive power, one that would consign the Bush ideas to a "bad old days" that should never return. (Of course, the ultimate way to reject the Bush/Cheney power claim is to prosecute Bush and Cheney for war crimes. Future presidents would have to take account of that.) He hasn't done so yet, and that has left us trying to read the tea leaves whenever he makes any decision related to executive power.

One recent leaf comes from the warrantless wiretapping issue . The Bush administration, with help from key Democrats in Congress, had managed to close off nearly every avenue for investigating this program, which on the face of it appears to be illegal. The one remaining chink in the program's armor was a lawsuit that the Electronic Frontier Foundation had filed against the NSA. Raw Story reports :

In their filing Friday, the Justice Department argued that the case should be dismissed because information surrounding the program was a “state secret” and therefore couldn’t be litigated or discussed. It also proposed that the government was protected by “sovereign immunity” under federal wiretapping statutes and the Patriot Act, arguing that the United States could only face lawsuits if they willfully elected to disclose intelligence obtained by wiretapping.

So Obama is not only trying to close the final door on accountability for illegal wiretapping, he is doing so by invoking the state secrets privilege , something he criticized the Bush administration for abusing. 

Another tea leaf is the administration's effort to make the Baghram prison in Afghanistan the same kind of legal black hole as Guantanamo was under Bush -- a place where suspects can be detained without any oversight or hearing.

During the Bush administration, some on the Right thought that executive power was purely a partisan issue, and that the Left would rally around a liberal president who made the same claims. It's not happening. On both Baghram and state secrets , Glenn Greenwald having the kind of reaction that got him the nickname Glenzilla . Keith Olbermann is having a fit ( video , transcript ) as well. They're not alone.

I'm sure Glenn and Keith and all the other liberal bloggers and pundits want to root for Obama, and everyone realizes that he is juggling a lot of important issues right now. But a Democratic Congress failed in its duty to impeach Bush when he broke the law. If a Democratic president now fails to reverse his policies, the effect will be a permanent change in the relationship between the branches of government. It's not enough for Obama to try to use the Bush powers responsibly. If he leaves them intact, some future president will use them irresponsibly.

---

OK, here's one good tea leaf to read: CIA Director Leon Panetta says the secret prisons have been shut down.

---

And not everybody reads the tea leaves the same way. See Obama supporters here and here.

---

---

  The Gathering Storm of Conservative Victimhood

One of the few conservative successes in 2008 was Proposition 8 , which made same-sex marriage illegal again in California. They did it with a change of tactics, which they are now trying to take national.

The first tactic against same-sex marriage was to laugh it off -- the idea was absurd; people proposing it couldn't be serious. When it started becoming reality in places like Massachusetts (then Connecticut, Iowa, and now Vermont -- by an act of the legislature, unprompted by the courts), the second tactic was apocalyptic: "The family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble," prophesied James Dobson in 2004, "presaging the fall of Western civilization itself."

But that message is less and less effective as it becomes clear that Massachusetts families are doing no worse than any others -- better than Bible Belt families , by most statistics. Boston continues to be a center of civilization. Entire countries -- Canada, for example -- have married Adam to Steve with no sign of apocalypse.

Worse (from the Right's point of view), the public is beginning to sympathize with same-sex couples, to see them as real people trying live their lives rather than as monsters intent on seeding moral chaos. The Courage Campaign's " Don't Divorce Us " video was a powerful weapon against Proposition 8.

And so we're into the third round of tactics: claiming victimhood. In other words, protecting gay rights means taking rights away from conservative Christians. Salon reports on a new ad called "The Gathering Storm" full of that-ain't-right sound bites that don't stand up to scrutiny.

For example, one of the characters in "The Gathering Storm" says: "I am a New Jersey church group punished by the government because we can't support same-sex marriage."

Not exactly. You should smell something fishy right away, because New Jersey doesn't have same-sex marriage . The reference is to a the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Methodist group in New Jersey. The LA Times explains that the OGCMA

owned seaside land that included a boardwalk pavilion. It obtained an exemption from state property tax for the land on the grounds that it was open for public use and access. Events such as weddings -- of any religion -- could be held in the pavilion by reservation. But when a lesbian couple sought to book the pavilion for a commitment ceremony, the nonprofit balked, saying this went against its religious beliefs. The court ruled against the nonprofit, not because gay rights trump religious rights but because public land has to be open to everyone or it's not public.

Most of the claims along these lines are similar. The "right" being violated is like the "right" of the Greensboro Woolworths not to serve blacks at its lunch counter . Like Woolworths in 1960, the Religious Right is arguing that it can define "the public" in such a way that some group is not part of it.

No.

Stanley Fish asks nails this one : "When a professional hangs out his shingle doesn’t he offer his services and skills to the public and not just to members of it who share his morality?"

And so I say an equal "no" to the professional photographer who won't work at a same-sex reception, the marriage counselor who won't help same-sex couples stay together, and the fertility doctor who won't help lesbians get pregnant. You don't get to define the public. That "right" can't be taken away from you because it was never a right to begin with.

---

---

  Untruth and Consequences

It's tempting to point to all the recent shootings as evidence for my past claim that we're going to see an upswing in right-wing violence. But it's not quite that simple: Of the recent incidents, only Richard Poplawski's shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers seems to be politically motivated. Poplawski was a heavily armed 22-year-old white supremacist who believed all sorts of conspiracy theories . Comments Gary Kamiya at Salon :

Poplawski's black-helicopter and anti-Semitic ravings put him at the outer edge of the right. But his paranoid fear that Obama was going to take away his AK-47 is mainstream among conservatives. That fear, fomented by the NRA and echoed by right-wing commentators from Lou Dobbs to Limbaugh, is ubiquitous online.

A lot of conclusions might be drawn here, but this is the one that strikes me: There are consequences to making stuff up and promoting it to the public as if it were true.

In any well-informed free society, you have to live with the possibility that some nutcase might have an extreme reaction to the news. If a Poplawski sees a headline about our trillion-dollar deficit and decides he has to kill somebody, what can you do (other than try to give our officials good security)? We do have a trillion-dollar deficit, and people should know about it.

But a considerable effort goes into manufacturing hysteria on the right, by pushing stories that have no basis in fact. Such as, Obama is going to:

• replace the dollar with an international currency
• take away our guns
• shut down right-wing talk radio by reinstituting the Fairness Doctrine
• or shut it down through local content rules ("Christian radio stations will be saddled with local Muslim 'advisory boards' demanding equal time and getting it.")
• gut the military  (in fact Obama proposes an increase in the defense budget as Stephen Colbert explains )
• use your tax dollars to build a train from Disneyland to a brothel in Nevada
• send American young people to mandatory "re-education camps" to be "trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward"
  
• rig the census  (in the words of RNC Chair Michael Steele) "to create permanent liberal control of the federal government"
  

And not that he could do it or might do it or we're afraid he'll do it -- he's doing it. If you're going to stop him you have to act now .

In addition the Obama myths are the nefarious activities attributed to liberal groups like ACORN , which was the object of vote fraud smears during the 2008 campaign, and is part of the "rig the census" charge . (ACORN is one of 250 groups helping the government recruit the 1.4 million temporary workers the census needs.) Did you know that ACORN is going to get $4 billion from the stimulus bill? ( Nope .) Or that ACORN is sending in undercover agents to disrupt the conservative "tea party" protests? ( Nuh-uh . If you don't know what a tea party protest is, you're in the same boat as ACORN's leaders.)

These imaginary stories are then fanned with inflamed rhetoric about taking back America and revolution . Congresswoman Michelle Bachman : "There is no free country for us to repair to. That's why it's up to us now." Glenn Beck : Obama is a "bloodsucker" and can only be stopped with "a stake through the heart".

None of these Republican politicians and conservative media celebrities is saying "go shoot somebody". Driving a stake through Obama's heart is -- you knew this, right? -- a metaphor. And talk about poisoning Justice Stevens was "just a joke". But they have to know that the right-wing fringe includes a lot of Richard Poplawskis and James Adkissons and Timothy McVeighs . (The Left has its own nutcases, but ours are more likely to hit you with a cruciatus curse than to blow you away with an AK-47.) It's not hard to guess what such people will do when they swallow what they're being fed.

I've long believed that conservatives look on the news cycle as a kind of game, where you win by getting people to believe and talk about stories that help you and hurt your opponents. But it's not a game. Untruth has consequences.

---

BTW, if you want to know why liberals can't discuss the teabag protests without cracking a smile, DailyKos TV explains -- with help from Sex and the City . That's why Rachel Maddow can barely keep from dissolving into laughter , while Jon Stewart just seems embarrassed by it all .

---

I have to give Glenn Beck this much credit: In this segment , he exercises a little quality control on the lunatic fringe. He debunks the YouTube videos claiming to show FEMA's concentration camps.

---

TPM readers who worked on the 2000 census are worried what might happen to census workers if they're perceived as part of some left-wing plot.

I'm convinced that there are plenty of unbalanced people who won't leave their houses to seek liberals to kill, but will kill a "radical leftist" (Steele's words) who knocks on their door in a mission to "falsify the U.S. Census and manipulate elections in their favor" (again, Steele's words).

---

---

  Short Notes

Ted Kennedy doesn't walk smoothly any more, and his attempt to throw out the first pitch at Fenway Park Tuesday didn't go very far. But he's still got the Kennedy smile.

---

Now that we've had a count, a recount, a review by the Board of Elections, and now a ruling by a three-judge panel , is it finally time for Norm Coleman to admit that he lost the Minnesota senate race and let Al Franken take his seat? Even many conservatives are finally urging him to give up .

---

Matt Yglesias makes a persuasive case that car sales have to perk up soon : At the current sales rate, it would take more than 25 years to replace the cars on the road.

---

Peru just convicted its former president Alberto Fujimori of authorizing a death squad against the Shining Path insurgents. The court sentenced him to 25 years. Digby comments :

It's interesting, no? The people all believe he committed these crimes yet he remains popular because of his economic policies. And the legal system operates independently of all of that, pursuing the case on the merits. How novel.

---

On the other hand, we're doing better than Zimbabwe :

President Robert Mugabe's top lieutenants are trying to force the political opposition into granting them amnesty for their past crimes by abducting, detaining and torturing opposition officials and activists, according to senior members of Mr. Mugabe’s party.

---

Now that his felony convictions have been thrown out due to misconduct by the Bush Justice Department, former Republican Senator Ted Stevens is receiving an outpowering of sympathy , including Gov. Palin's call for a special election so that he can win his Senate seat back.

Everybody needs to take a breath. You know who else is free because of prosecutor misconduct? Bill Ayers . Getting off on a technicality doesn't mean you're innocent .

---

Speaking of Palin, lately we've been seeing the main reason why she will never be president: She doesn't have the temperament for it. National politicians need to have thick skins, and to know when a fight is beneath their dignity. Palin doesn't. That's what the whole Troopergate story was about: Becoming governor was just a new way to pursue a family vendetta, not a mandate to rise above it.

The recent example of this character flaw is her reaction to the media tour by Levi Johnston and his family. A saavy politician would have either ignored it or released an above-it-all statement recognizing that the Johnstons were bound to tell the story in their own way. Salon's Rebecca Traister comments :

Not Sarah Palin! No, this wizard decided the best way to tackle the (understandably irritating) problem of her loose-lipped would-have-been son-in-law was to publicly rebuke the kid, in a grandiose statement of denial and affronted morals , the weekend before the offending interview was to air , thereby ensuring that the episode of "Tyra" would become must-see television.

She struck back again after Levi told CBS that the Palins were "snobby". And now she's in a public cat-fight with a family that feels it has to deny being "white trash" .

---

The RNC 8 are would-be protesters who face felony charges because of their "conspiracy" to "disrupt" last September's Republican Convention in Minneapolis. The good news:  terrorism charges against them have been dropped . You can watch their arrest in September.

---

You can track the ongoing demise of the newspaper industry through the blog Paper Cuts . Salon has an article about the effort to fund investigative journalism through non-profits . It also contains this interesting observation:

Long before the current recession and radical cutbacks, many newspapers had lost their community watchdog function, no longer bothering with the expensive and time-consuming work of investigative reporting. A 2005 survey by Arizona State University of the 100 largest U.S. dailies found that 37 percent had no full-time investigative reporters, and the majority of the major dailies had two or fewer.

As if to illustrate the point, a Daily Kos post takes apart a NYT article on the well-paid global warming nay-sayer Marc Morano . After reading the Times' article, you know what lots of people claim, but no objective facts that could help you assess those claims.

If only it were someone's job to uncover those facts, or to check people's statements rather than just quote them. That would be worth paying for.

Finally, DailyKos founder Kos points out that a lot of investigative journalism gets done outside of newspapers .

---

GM and Segway combine on a vehicle that looks very cool, but you have to wonder about the crash tests.

---

Home Stretch

Home Stretch

The Unlikely Truth About Polls

At this point in every campaign season, failing politicians are saying something like: "I don't believe in the polls. The only poll that counts is on Election Day."



This year you have to wonder if that might be the right attitude. Should we believe these polls?


The worrisome thing is how diverse they are. On Thursday, for example, the IBD/TIPP national poll had Obama's lead shrinking to a mere 1.1%, while the CBS/NYT poll it growing to 13%. Something like that happens almost every day. How is that even possible? If the polls are all measuring the same underlying reality, shouldn't every poll be within the margin-of-error of every other poll?



It turns out that's not what margin-of-error means. A poll's MOE is really only the margin of one kind of error, known as sampling error. The other kinds of error are nearly unmeasurable (at least until there's a real election), but that doesn't mean they're zero.



Sampling error amounts to this: If the pollster does everything right -- chooses a truly random sample of the electorate, questions them in a way that doesn't influence their answers, and so on -- and if the respondents don't lie, then the results still might be off just because of the luck of the draw. You might happen to pick a few too many McCain or Obama supporters in one day's sample, just as you might flip ten coins and get four or six heads rather than five.



But sampling error is just the beginning of what might go wrong with a poll.

The Weekly Sift: Home Stretch

Sift: October 27

The Unlikely Truth about Polls

At about this time in every campaign,
failing politicians are saying something like: "I don't believe in the
polls. The only poll that counts is on Election Day."



This year you have to wonder if they might be telling the truth: Should we believe these polls?



The worrisome thing is how diverse they are. On Thursday, for
example, the IBD/TIPP national poll had Obama's lead shrinking to a mere 1.1%, while the CBS/NYTpoll
it growing to 13%. Something like that happens almost every day. How is
that even possible? If the polls are all measuring the same underlying
reality, shouldn't every poll be within the margin-of-error
of every other poll?



It turns out that's not what margin-of-error means. A poll's MOE is really only the margin of one kind of error, known as sampling error.
The other kinds of error are nearly unmeasurable (at least until
there's a real election), but that doesn't mean they're zero.

Sampling error amounts to this: If
the pollster does everything right -- chooses a truly random sample of
the electorate, questions them in a way that doesn't influence their
answers, and so on -- and if
the respondents don't lie, then the results still might be off just
because of the luck of the draw. You might happen to pick a few too
many McCain or Obama supporters in one day's sample, just as you might
flip ten coins and get four or six heads rather than five.









But sampling error is just the beginning of what might go wrong with a
poll.







Today,
pollsters do lots of tricks with the data -- tricks that are supposed
to make the poll more accurate. One of those tricks is called re-weighting:
If you look at your sample and it conflicts with known demographic
data, you make a correction. So if your sample is 55% male and the
electorate is only 49% male, then you might count each male
response as slightly less than one vote to make the overall sample
representative. Or you might re-weight by age or race or income.
Different polls juggle the numbers in different ways, and so they might
report different results even if they interview the same people and get the same responses.









A particularly difficult thing to guess, especially this year, is who
is actually going to vote. That's what polls do when they report
results on "likely voters". Different polls have very different ideas
about what makes a person likely to vote. Nate Silver, the polling wonk behind 538.com, gives us some much-needed insight into the likely-voter models
of various pollsters. He notes, for example, that on Wednesday both CNN
and ABC showed Obama with a 10-point lead among registered voters.
Among "likely" voters, though, Obama's CNN lead shrunk to 5%, but was
still 9% on ABC. That 4-point difference amounts to CNN and ABC having a disagreement about who is going to vote.







In most years, the likely voters are more Republican than the merely
registered voters. The relatively powerless get discouraged about
voting, but if they vote, most of them vote Democrat. This year,
though, Obama has invested massively in what the pros call the "ground
game" -- registering new voters and making sure they get to the polls
come election day. If that works -- and it did in the primaries -- then
any previous cycle's model of likely voters is probably wrong.








Silver suggests a very simple check pollsters could do in this era of early
voting: Ask people whether they've already voted. If a large number of
people that your model says are "unlikely" have in fact already voted,
then you need to fix your model.








Because of this modeling uncertainty, Silver advises taking any single
poll with a grain of salt. If it looks like an outlier, he says, it
probably is.

"Not Because They're Racists"

The weirdest event of the week was that young white female McCain
worker in Pennsylvania who made up a story about being attacked by a
big black male Obama supporter. I think the whole story is sad and has
little to do with either McCain or Obama, so I'm not going to repeat
the woman's name or link to a picture of her. But there is one person
here who deserves to be singled out for shame: John Moody, the
executive vice president of Fox News.



Writing on the Fox Forum blog, Moody called the incident a "moment of truth" and a "watershed event" for the presidential race:

If [the woman's] allegations are proven
accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator 
Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John
Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about
the Democratic nominee.

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.




Both of these assertions are perverse. Let's take the second one first.
The incident turned out to be a hoax, but the strange idea that
McCain's quest for the presidency is over now has quietly vanished at
Fox. Moody has not even done a follow-up what-was-I-thinking blog post.



Now re-read that first paragraph. If some black man in Pittsburgh
really did attack a white woman, that would cause some voters to
"revisit their support for Senator Obama."



What other than racism could possibly connect those dots?



But of course, open racism is not acceptable in America today, so Moody
offers his readers a rationalization: If this incident makes you want
to vote against Obama, you're not a racist, you just "don't know
enough" about Obama -- as if there were something you could "know"
about Obama that would disconnect him from this incident that your
racism has connected him to.

Short Notes

You shouldn't let desperate politicians distract you this week, but if you're
looking for a way to distract yourself, try Neil Gaiman's new novel. Gaiman is a
writer of twisted fantasy for all ages -- just not all ages at the same time. He
has written for children (The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish),
youth (Coraline), and grown-ups (American Gods), and his 1990s
series Sandman is legendary among comic-book readers. Well, what would
happen if such a writer did a homage to Kipling's The Jungle Book? The
Graveyard Book, of course: Nobody Owens is an orphaned toddler who is
adopted and raised by the ghosts from an ancient and all-but-abandoned English
graveyard. With the help of a protective vampire and werewolf, the dead keep
Nobody safe from those truly scary beings, the living.

---

If Sarah Palin can see Russia, maybe the Russians are watching her too. Vlad and Boris sing of their unrequited love in "Song for Sarah". 

---

I've told a lot of stories about McCain/Palin supporters behaving badly, so I should point you to at least one where they behave well. 

---

The Chicago Tribune
provides a little local perspective on Bill Ayers. Eric Zorn found 60
local-news references to Ayers during the 90s. "the record shows he
just wasn't a very controversial figure." Mike Royko thought he was a
jerk, but associating-with-jerks isn't much to smear a guy with.

---

One of cutest get-out-the-vote tactics I've ever seen: A customizable video blaming an individual voter for Obama's one-vote loss. Send them to your friends.

---

Another feature test

Another feature test

blah blah blah.

bookmark













link

Heading

Feature test



I want to figure out what Blogger is doing with the internal bookmarks.



Here's a bookmark.







This is a link to that bookmark.

This is a test of what Blogger does with GoogleDocs' horizontal lines. I'm inserting one here.

---

And I hope that it neatly separates these two sentences.

Some Assembly Required

A sermon delivered by Doug Muder
at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts
April 27, 2008

My favorite route home from college used to take me through the small town of Ripley, Illinois. I always smiled when I drove past the sign for the Ripley Church of God. Because every time, the same irreverent phrase went through my mind: Believe it or not.

These days something similar happens whenever I pass an Assembly of God church. You know what phrase pops into my mind then? Some assembly required. I picture a bunch of people with a God kit and an enormous set of directions, trying to figure out how to make the omnipotence fit together with the benevolence.

I suspect that’s not really what they do in Assemblies of God. But it’s not a bad metaphor for what Unitarian Universalists do. Our religion doesn’t come to us as a finished product; some assembly is required. As George Marshall wrote: “Don’t come to a Unitarian Universalist church to be given a religion. Come to develop your own religion.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors for Unitarian Universalism, because I believe that’s what goes wrong when we try to explain our faith to friends and guests and newcomers. No matter how precisely we define our terms or state our principles, if people arrive at this church with the wrong metaphors and analogies in their heads, they’re not going to make much sense out of what we say.

Take that Marshall quote: develop your own religion. What could that possibly mean? Are you supposed to climb Sinai and meet God face-to-face? Proclaim yourself the Messiah? What?

I think that line works best if you interpret develop as what happens in an old-fashioned darkroom. Expose your religion to the right light and the right catalysts, and gradually its unique image will become clearer and clearer. In that sense, this church is good place to develop your religion.

*

When newcomers arrive with the wrong unconscious metaphors in their heads, they tend to ask yes-or-no questions where both answers are bad. Raise your hand if you’ve heard this one: Can UUs believe anything they want?

How do you answer that? Well, UUs have freedom of belief. No creed. No dogma. So the answer you want to give is “Yes. At this church you can believe anything you want.”

But that doesn’t sound like a serious religion at all, does it? “What do I want to believe today? I think I’ll believe … that I can fly! Wouldn’t that be nice? Yes, I think I’ll believe that today.”

And a newcomer thinks: “Maybe these privileged, white, suburban intellectual types can get away with that kind of religion. But my life is harder than that. I need a real religion, not something whimsical.”

*

So what went wrong there?

The question Can you believe anything you want? assumes a bad analogy. You see, freedom of belief is unfamiliar to people whose only experience is in creed-based religions, so they understand it through an analogy to freedom of speech. And there the either/or makes perfect sense: If no one is telling me what to say, then I can say whatever I want. Up is down. Two plus two is five. I haven’t changed a bit since I turned thirty.

I can say all those things; but I can’t believe them. You see, believing anything you want isn’t a religion, it’s a mental dysfunction.

That’s not what we’re doing. As UUs we have freedom from authority, not freedom from reality. Better to describe it like this: Your life – whether it has been easy or hard or somewhere in between – has taught you certain things. It doesn’t matter whether those things are in some creed or scripture, and it also doesn’t matter whether or not you want to believe them. You just do. And the freedom this church offers is that you can admit that you believe what you really do believe.

*

Here’s a metaphor I remember from growing up as a Christian: Church is where you study for your final exam. Judgment Day is coming. There will be questions. You’ll need answers. So you go to church.

Metaphors like that have a way of shaping your perceptions, even after you think you’ve forgotten them. And people who bring a final exam metaphor to a UU church are going to be confused. Because we don’t give them answers: Is there a God? Is there an afterlife? Should they be worshiping something or praying to somebody? “Those are good questions,” we say. “You should work on them.”

But if a final exam is coming, that response isn’t very helpful. Imagine coming to the cram session for your history final, and the teacher won’t tell you when the Civil War ended. And each student seems to have a different answer: 1820 ... 1865 ... 1910 ... Tuesday. And it doesn’t bother them. They sit there and contradict each other and everybody seems happy.

That’s how we look to a newcomer who’s thinking about a final exam. Afterlife? This person believes in reincarnation. That one expects to see her loved ones in Heaven. Somebody over there thinks death is final. And maybe we argue, but we’re not trying to enforce some agreement. We’re not looking to throw anybody out. We even teach each other’s children. How does that work?

*

We can’t address that kind of confusion purely on an intellectual level, with more precise definitions and clearer principles. If we’re going to communicate what UUism is really like, we need to make the unconscious metaphor explicit and challenge it.

So: If life is a class, what if it’s the kind of class where you work on a project rather than study for an exam? What if your life is something that you’re making, not something you’re going to be quizzed on? That changes everything. Now you don’t need a cram session, you need a workshop.

And if it’s a workshop where people use a lot of different ideas and different techniques – so much the better. When I get stuck, when something’s not working for me, I can wander around the workshop and see a lot of different ways of making a life. Humanists do it this way or that way. Christians have this extra tool. Here’s a little trick I picked up from the Buddhists.

Let’s push that metaphor a little further. If you’re an artist or a craftsman, only two things ultimately matter: First, the product, the actual thing that you’re eventually going to show the world. And second, the experience of making -- your sense of inspiration, the ecstatic feeling you get when you fall into your work and everything starts coming together.

Everything else only matters to the extent that it affects one of those two. For example, your beliefs about your craft have only an instrumental importance. If they don’t affect either the product or your experience of making the product, then who cares about them?

Follow that metaphor back to life. As you’re making your life, the two ultimately important things are: First, what you do, the objective actions that you take in the world. And second, how you experience your life. Are you just getting by, passing the time? Or is your life vibrant, exciting, meaningful?

Your beliefs about life – your theology and your philosophy – are secondary.

Let me say that again, because I think that it’s sufficiently unorthodox to be worth repeating: Theology, by itself, doesn’t matter. You believe in God or you don’t. You believe in an afterlife or you don’t. But the important things are what you do and how you experience it.

*

Now, to a newcomer all that may sound like a religion that I just made up. And certainly not all UUs would agree with everything I just said – that’s OK, they don’t have to. But these ideas are rooted an a long tradition.

The whole point of Universalism was to escape the final exam metaphor: Life is a class that everyone passes. Great Universalists like Hosea Ballou didn’t preach to gain converts for Heaven, but to spread the experience of God’s love here on Earth. One of the most important sermons in Unitarian history, Theodore Parker's “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” placed the whole scaffolding of orthodox theology – the Trinity, the atonement, the infallibility of scripture – in the transient category. What was permanent? The Christian experience: “Religious doctrines and forms will always differ,” Parker said. “But the Christianity holy men feel in the heart, the Christ that is born within us, is always the same thing to each soul that feels it.”

Another famous Unitarian, President John Adams, said, “I do not attach much importance to creeds because I believe he cannot be wrong whose life is right." As far back as the 1600s, Spinoza was picturing a congregation in which each person believes something a little different from his neighbor. He wrote: “Each person – seeing that he is the best judge of his own character – should adopt whatever beliefs he thinks best adapted to strengthen his love of justice.”

Let me sum that up: If you have beliefs that let you live with your eyes open, give you an enthusiasm or a deep satisfaction with your life, and inspire you to live kindly and to be a force for good in the world, then as UUs we are happy for you – whether we share your beliefs or not. We’re happy for you to belong to this church, and we’re happy for you preach from our pulpit, and we’re happy for you to teach our children. Because living comes first; believing is secondary.

*

Let’s do one more newcomer question: Could Hitler be a UU?

Now, the people who ask this question usually aren’t trying to compare us to Hitler. They’re just trying to find our boundaries. How far does our welcome go? Is anything over the line?

The most superficial version of this question is whether Hitler could attend a UU church. And there I think that -- as long as he behaved himself -- the answer is yes. I’m sure having Hitler in the room would make a lot of us uncomfortable. It would make me uncomfortable. But we’d be balancing that discomfort against another idea that comes out of our Universalist heritage: We don’t give up on people. We don’t assume that anyone is irredeemable. The likelihood that a Hitler could turn his life around may be very, very small. But to the extent that Universalists believe in miracles, those are the kinds of miracles we believe in.

The challenging question, though, isn’t “Could Hitler change into a UU?” but “Could Hitler stay the way he was and be a UU?” After all, people with lots of different philosophies can be UUs. There are Christian UUs and Buddhist UUs and atheist UUs. How far can that go? Could there be Nazi UUs?

There I think the answer is no. But explaining why takes us into another set of unfortunate metaphors.

The point of asking about Nazi Unitarians is to find a boundary. The questioner expects us to say “No, that’s over the line.” And then we’ll have to explain where the line is. The underlying metaphor is that a religion is a territory with borders to defend. And if you give the easy answer, if you say that Hitler couldn’t be a UU because he didn’t believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, you’re ratifying that metaphor. You’re turning the Principles into a creed and using them to draw boundaries. But that’s not what the Principles are for. The Principles describe the center of UUism, not its boundaries. And we keep restating our principles because our center moves from one generation to the next.

Eighty years ago, L. B. Fisher was already rejecting the territory metaphor. “Universalists are often asked to tell where they stand,” he wrote. “The only true answer to give to this question is that we do not stand at all, we move. Or we are asked to state our position. Again, we can only answer that we are not staying to defend any position. We are on the march.”

A related metaphor is that a religion is a kind of museum. Certain divine truths were revealed to our ancestors, told to us by our parents, and now we preserve them unchanged for our children. And if our parents and grandparents have let those truths get corrupted, then we need to reach even further into the past to recover the purity that our faith had during its Golden Age.

That’s not us. Unitarian Universalism never had a Golden Age. We aren’t trying to get back to Eden, or the days of the prophets, or the early Christian community, or even Emerson’s circle of Concord transcendentalists. Because UUism is not a museum, it’s a laboratory. We’re not preserving the truths of our ancestors; we’re using them, experimenting with them, and trying to make them better.

In every generation we’ve had great teachers like William Ellery Channing. And in every following generation we’ve had Samuel Mays to argue with them. That’s our tradition. It’s not a settling, boundary-defining, fortress-building tradition. It’s an evolving tradition, a tradition that keeps moving and changing.

And so, if you think of a religion as a territory with boundaries, Unitarian Universalism is going to confuse you. We’re not a walled city, we’re a caravan. We move; we are on the march. We aren’t defending lines in the sand, we’re traveling. We have all joined the caravan at different points. We carry different baggage. We progress at different speeds. But we’re on the road together, and we’re doing our best to help each other along the way.

Now, caravans don’t have borders. There are scouts running ahead, and some will be followed and some won’t. There are stragglers. There are outliers. Some people will turn in a different direction, and some will wander into the desert and get lost. You can’t draw a line around a caravan and say exactly who’s in and who’s out. But one thing you can say with some certainty is that the people you meet coming the opposite way are not part of the caravan. And while some of them may turn around and decide to join you, the ones that don’t turn around are not joining.

And that’s how I respond to the idea of Nazi UUs. We may not be able to say exactly where this caravan is going, but it has a history, it has a direction. For centuries, for as long as we’ve been on the road, we have been traveling in some very un-Nazi directions: towards greater freedom, more acceptance of difference, less violence, and an ever-wider circle of compassion.

Are those divine, unquestionable truths? Should we keep them safe in our museum. No. We continue to test them. We continue to experiment and improve and elaborate. And we keep moving. But if you want to undo that whole history, you’re not just pointing in a new direction. You’re asking us to go back and start over. It would be a new caravan then. It wouldn’t be Unitarian Universalism.

*

I’d like to close by coming back to a point I touched on earlier: the misperception that there is something whimsical and insubstantial about this faith. That it’s whatever you want. That we make it up fresh every morning, and maybe tomorrow, when you really need it, you won’t find anything at all.

Our history shows that we are anything but insubstantial. Look at the people who have lived and died in this movement. Look at the lives they have led, the causes they have fought for, the people they have helped. Theodore Parker used to preach with a gun in his desk, in case someone came to collect the fugitive slaves he was hiding. This is not a tradition of whimsical, indecisive, insubstantial people.

The illusion that there is nothing here comes from looking for the wrong things. If you come here looking for a museum, you won’t find it; this is a laboratory. If you come looking for answers to the final exam, sorry, we’re working on our projects. If you’re looking for boundaries and fortresses to defend them; we don’t have any. We’re a caravan; we’re on the march. If you’re looking for the Church of Believe It Or Not, look somewhere else. This is the Church of Some Assembly Required.

We are the heirs to a long and proud tradition, but it’s an evolving tradition. We come from a long line of people who refused to accept what they were taught and pass it down unaltered. All the great names in this tradition – Channing, Ballou, Emerson, Parker, and many others – we would dishonor their memory if we turned this caravan around and went back to the places they discovered.

And future generations of Unitarian Universalists would dishonor our memory if they stopped here and built a fortress and started defending its walls. Half a century ago, Brock Chisholm put it like this: “Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are.”

And Theodore Parker said, “Progressive development does not end with us.” May that be as true in our generation as it was in his.