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| Tamara Payne-Alex and Jim Key kicked off their campaigns for UUA Moderator at a joint appearance at last year's General Assembly in Phoenix.. |
I occasionally
use this blog as a forum for my
opinionated screeds concerning governance issues within the Unitarian Univeralist Association (UUA), certainly one of the dullest of
all topics to anyone without a dog in hunt.
I typically lob a grenade or two from the side lines and then scamper
back to my cave in the mountains while a modicum of confusion and consternation
ensues in a handful of blogs and Facebook postings.
Be
warned. I am at it again. The catalyst this time was an innocent Facebook
post by UUWorld Editor Chris Walton about endorsements on the web
sites of the two candidates for the post of Moderator one of whom will be elected at General Assembly in Indianapolis
this summer.
For
non governance geeks who have gotten this far, the Moderator is generally
considered the highest volunteer position
in the UUA. He or she is the Chair of
the Board of Trustees—a virtual President of the Board if the executive title
were not in use elsewhere—and presides very visibly at General Assembly plenary sessions. The position is traditionally held by lay
person, although there is no bar to a minister seeking or being elected to the
post, just as the President of the
UUA has always been ordained
although that is not required either.
For about 40 years the job has been filled by women and some have come
to view it as the seat at the table of power for the gender.
Chris
provided links to the endorsement pages of both candidates, Tamara Payne-Alex and Jim Key. Check both out. The are enlightening and inspiring as to the
quality of human beings seeking the job. Then he asked how those endorsements might affect our personal preferences.
My
longtime cyber friend, fellow
blogger and queen of social media Suzyn
Smith Webb quipped that Key “has the older white dude with beard vote
locked up.” That was enough to set me
off and running like an old hound with fire crackers tied to his tail.
As
a cure for insomnia for those who missed the original post, here is what I had
to say, pretty much unedited except for stopping to breathe and adding
paragraphs.
I guess you will
have to put me down with the old white guys with beards. Certainly fit the description. Not that it matters much. I am mere layman who has never held a single
significant post in our movement outside of my congregation.
I have been a
gad-fly commentator on governance issues and worked on the periphery of two (successful)
presidential campaigns. I have been seen
by some as a burr under the saddle and sniper from the sidelines because I have
become very critical of the Board in recent years as it became the Great Black Hole of our movement,
sucking in, destroying, or disarming every independent or quasi-independent
power source out there all in the name of Transparency, Simon
Pure Congregational Polity, and the worship of a particularly rigid form of
Policy Governance as if it were
handed down from Mt. Sinai. All of this allegedly in the name of real democracy.
This includes an
ongoing war with UUA President Peter
Morales who had the audacity not to submit to being a clerical functionary
of the Board, but a popularly elected leader.
Now that you
know where I come from, I respect both candidates.
Tamara Payne-Alex
has been a literal golden child since the first moment she stepped onto the
denominational (flog me for the use of that word latter) stage. Earning her credentials as an anti-racist
leader and an attractive, dynamic presence it was clear that she was destined
someday for leadership at the very top
level.
Jim Key,
however, was an unknown quantity to me sitting out here in the Mid-West. It looked like he might be a regional
candidate, or, indulging in the paranoid fantasies not unknown among followers
of UUA politics, that he might have been nominated as weak opposition to an anointed
successor to Gini Courter. Reading his list of
endorsers, heavy on the hirsute and superannuated or not, and what they had to
say was a revelation to me. And there
were even some leading persons of color
and some who have not yet drawn their rocking chair money.
What got me most
was the breadth of Key’s hands on leadership at several levels, his touted
ability bridge differences and reach working solutions to complex and emotional
problems. Above all this is an election
when outsider status to the current
Board is critical.
He sewed it up for me with the reported
rejection of the notion that the Moderator should have his/her own program to
drive through with relentless single mindedness which is Gini’s legacy, no
matter how perfectly charming she was presiding over GAs.
Jim Key can have
my endorsement, but he might not want it.
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