Sermon

INTRODUCTION: In mid-October, many years ago, I was attending a public school in a small country town, known as Tuttle, Oklahoma. My mother was the pastor, and Dad was gone most of the time preaching as an evangelist as far away as California.

Then one day I learned we were moving to a little town that was a suburb to Oklahoma City. I still recall that with our family of seven, the attendance at church on the first Sunday totaled 19. Dad sold Nutri-lite vitamins and Rexall Vacuum Cleaners, door-to-door, to support our family.

I only had to walk about four blocks to school for my first day in a new sixth grade class. My teacher, Mrs. Howell, was very nice. And after the class had started, she asked me to come forward and she introduced me to the other students. Then she asked, “Wayne, what does your father do?” I proudly said, “He’s the pastor of the Pentecostal Holiness Church.” In response, Helen, a little red-haired, freckled face girl on the front row said, “That’s the holy-roller church.”

The others laughed, and I’m sure that my face turned as red as Helen’s. But worse, it was the first time that I had ever been embarrassed about my identity with a Pentecostal Holiness Church – “holy rollers, as Helen called us. Plus, I had never seen any one, holy or unholy, roll on the floor in church, in any of the scores of Pentecostal Churches I had been to.

Though I’m sure there had been plenty of cultural conditioning to being poor and to being part of a different kind of church, the reality was I loved my parents. And the people who were part of the churches they pastored were good people in every sense of the word. But I questioned my religious identity for the first time.

Now though, much that I treasure and feel good about in my life, roots back to those first 25 years of identity as a Pentecostal. I learned to identify with the poor and the oppressed. I grew out of my southern attitudes about race. And some facets of the rhythm and cadence of Pentecostal preaching still mark my delivery occasionally. But most of all, I learned to be proud of my heritage, rather than turn red in the face and be embarrassed when anyone discovered it.

Our identities are very powerful. Gay men and lesbian women struggle, especially as teens, to deal with their differentness in sexual orientation. Jews as a people have dealt with stereotypes and prejudice for millennia. In different times and places, most of us have confronted challenges of some kind or other because of a particular identity. And although it’s hard to imagine in May 2011 in America, there is a huge movement backwards presently going on about women and their rights.

My late best friend, novelist Robert L. Duncan, told me that in his research for one of his novels, he discovered that in the 1930s in Shanghai, China, for a mother to give birth to a girl was a great disappointment. Consequently, many times, midwives would typically take newborn girls and throw them into the Huangpu River. But hiding on the river banks were Roman Catholic sisters and nuns, who would then dive in to the river in hopes of rescuing the baby, and then take them to the orphanage they had established.

Though that was 75 years ago, China is still dealing with its issues and attitudes towards women. Its one-child policy results in many abortions due purely to parents wanting male rather than female offspring. Two-thirds of the world’s 774 million illiterates are women. (I’m sure you are aware that the Taliban we’re fighting in Afghanistan seeks to prevent the education of girls.) Women do most of the world’s work, receive a miniscule proportion of the world’s salaries, and a disproportionate few own any of the land. Seventy-five percent of the starving people of the world are women and their dependent children.

And in this enlightened nation, America was founded with no provision for women to vote. A widow with land lost it when she remarried. The courts even upheld a man when he horsewhipped his wife. It wasn’t until 1920 that the 19^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution enabled women to vote. More than 40 years later, gender equality was finally guaranteed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to wit:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. (Title IX)

And just in case you’ve forgotten how bad it was for women, before Title IX, women earned just seven percent of all law degrees and only nine percent of all medical degrees. In fact, after ghostwriting a book on medicine and learning of that disparity, I shared what I was learning with a female physician in my congregation at the time. She disclosed some of the barriers she had been forced to hurdle. From then on, I intentionally began to choose female physicians when possible. With Title IX, by 2001, women received forty-seven percent of law degrees and forty-three percent of medical degrees. In 1970, women earned only 13.3 % of doctoral degrees; by 2009, more women than men received doctoral degrees.

To bring it a little closer to home, more than half of all active Unitarian Universalist ministers are women. Despite first granting ordination to women in 1863, women only achieved parity in the late 90s. Now our three neighboring Unitarian Universalist churches – Port Charlotte, Naples, and the UU Church of Ft. Myers – all three have women ministers: one older, one middle-aged, and one in her early 30s. And when I retire in two years, there is a high predictability that the person who follows me will be a woman.

Despite all of these good things that I have mentioned, can you believe what is happening to women’s rights in America as I speak! It’s as if a giant regressive clock had been placed in State Legislatures and Congress, where the Tea Party/Republican majorities are determined to roll back the clock on gains that women have struggled to achieve for all these centuries.

And it’s not just about abortion! That’s what they keep saying, but that’s not true. It’s about contraceptives. It’s about family planning. It’s about economics for the poorest of the poor. It’s about being a mother.

Margaret Sanger said almost 100 years ago that every woman ought to be able to determine when and if she wants to become a mother. But guess what: The bills coming out of Congress and the state legislatures are specifically drawn to prevent any money going to any agency that has any relationship of any kind to abortions – no matter if the agency does wonderful work in family planning. There seems to be no perception on the part of any of the Tea Party/Republican lawmakers that family planning prevents abortions. That’s basic logic 101. And yet the great state of Indiana – sorry Ed and Carol – just this past week passed laws eliminating all financing to Planned Parenthood, which the governor has promised to sign. That is synonymous with doing away with any state aid for family planning!

My daughter went to work as the Director of Education at the Panhandle Planned Parenthood in Amarillo, Texas, in 1992, the same year that George W. Bush became governor. At the time, they had 17 satellite clinics of varying sizes. Twenty years later, guess how many satellite clinics they have: Zip! Nada! None! Was he a great governor or not! Now there is only one family planning, reproductive health care clinic in the entire upper Texas Panhandle and it’s miles away in Amarillo, Texas, serving the entire north and northeastern Panhandle of Texas. And they had never performed abortions – not even one! So don’t believe them when they say it’s about abortions. It’s about contraceptives and birth control

In my opinion, after Roe v. Wade, when Planned Parenthood began to encounter strong resistance from conservatives and the Roman Catholic Church, it made a huge strategic error when it defended its right to providing family planning services, including termination of pregnancies, as being “pro-choice.” Those opposed to family planning designated what they did as “pro-life.” While “choice” is a good word, it also carries with it the notion of its being an intellectual exercise – maybe, maybe not. There’s nothing intellectual about the decision to terminate a pregnancy. It’s synonymous with the right to determine when and if one becomes a mother.

To exercise the right to determine when to be a mother is what family planning is about. “Pro-choice,” as an effective term in educating the public, has failed miserably. So that today, legislators, appealing to the crowds, can talk about their strong support for life and sustaining life in the womb, when in fact the laws they are passing are putting the lives of more young women at risk and making mothers out of children who never wanted to be mothers, who don’t have the emotional, physical, or financial health to be mothers – not to mention the damage to the unwanted children brought into the world.

I don’t know how many of you remember a few years back when one of our members, Dr. Jean Windsor, served as the Medical Director for Lee County Jails. She cared for a young 25-year old woman, drug addicted, who fed her habit through prostitution. She was now in a first trimester pregnancy. She told Dr. Windsor that she already had two children that she couldn’t take care of; she desperately didn’t want to give birth to a third child in prison; but the jail system would not underwrite the thousand plus dollars it would cost to terminate her pregnancy.

So how do you provide abortion to a woman in jail in Lee County Florida America? Dr. Windsor stood at the door beside me and received more than $1,100, in cash, which Steve and Chris Fisher then took to the county jails, and jumped through an incredible number of hoops, to insure that the young woman received the abortion she had requested. Otherwise, there would right now be another unwanted child in the world for someone else to raise, especially since her or his mother was rearrested for prostitution, so as to feed her drug addiction

So in communicating with your legislators, don’t identify yourself as “pro-choice,” say, “pro-family planning,” “pro-mothers’ rights,” “pro-contraception,” and “pro-women’s rights.”

And don’t give up. Hold their feet to the fire. Call, write, and e-mail your outrage at what is happening to women and their rights, especially the right to determine when they become a mother. That’s basic to the identity of a woman!

Several years ago, I was at the offices of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, when candidate for governor, Jeb Bush made a scheduled stop. He voiced strong support for the workers. But when someone asked him about the rights of undocumented workers, he became a different person. It was as if he had no idea that the majority of the agricultural workers in Immokalee were undocumented.

And perhaps the only intelligent legislative control put on Florida’s disaster of a governor, is to refuse to pass an Arizona style anti-immigration bill that allows police to check the legal status of anyone they reasonably suspect of being in the country illegally. (Arizona has had huge second thoughts about what their law is doing to business.) That only happened after intense lobbying by farming, resort and law-enforcement interests — along with hundreds of mostly Hispanics. Let’s be clear: Some of the hardest workers in America are immigrants. It was true of your immigrant parents or grandparents or great grandparents. They worked two jobs, endured incredible indignities – all to make it in America. They were the engine of our economic success. Now through the likes of Fox News, immigrants have been painted as criminals, and unwelcome. What a travesty. Many if not most, simply have document issues. We need them. We need to treat them as we would like to be treated. The bible is still right when it urges us to treat the alien among us with love and respect. And just in case you might be able to use it, or have forgotten what it states, I will read it for us: But the alien who dwells among you shall be unto you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were once aliens in the land of Egypt…. Finally:

Ten months ago, at the direction of our Board of Trustees, I met in Minneapolis, Minnesota with the District Executive of the Florida Unitarian Universalists. The purpose was to determine how responsive he would be to All Faiths’ application for affiliation with the UUA. As I reported back to the Board, he was most affirming. From there forward, our Board chair, Ed Kleinow, and our UU Task Force consisting of co-chairs, Ann Batal and Carol Elrod, led us in an educational effort, as well as arranging visits with representatives from the three UU congregations nearby. We also had visits from the District Executive, Kenn Hurto, and from Joan Lund, the Florida trustee to the national board of the UUA. And our congregation voted almost unanimously to apply for affiliation. Only the week before last did we learn that our application to membership had been fully accepted.

We will spend this summer on some of the richest of the UUA’s history, theology, and faith development. Specifically, we will research the identity question of “What it means to be a Unitarian Universalist?” But let me give you a hint. It means: “Standing on the side of Love.”

Unitarian Universalists are perhaps best known in this era for their national stands on issues of social justice, especially, women’s reproductive health care, immigrants, sexual identity issues, race, disabilities, war and peace, and on the list goes. They call it: “Standing on the side of Love.”

From now on, I’m hoping we can identify all that we try to do for others in our community, state, nation and world in the same way as: “Standing on the side of Love.” I invite you to join with me in that task.

[1] A sermon given May 01, 2011, at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation (Unitarian Universalist), located at 2756 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne A. Robinson, Minister.