#321 | Mary and Mark Tuller | Remove Capitalizations & Many Words

2023 Article II Amendment Idea Submissions Amendment Ideas
1

Submission 321
Mary and Mark Tuller
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Dieguito (Solana Beach, CA) 2521

What is your suggestion or idea?

We applaud the work done behind this proposal. There is a
lot to like and inspire in your work. Thank you. However, we would like to propose
for discussion several amendments to fix omissions and slightly redirect the
values.
Each is submitted separately as requested but they are related for the
reasons below.

This is suggestion number 4 of 4:

Remove capitalizations and many words that don’t contribute much.

What is the reason for your amendment idea?

Minor stylistic points. We greatly dislike unexpected
capitalizing out of context. We suggest lower-casing Love, Beloved
Communities. We also personally dislike the change from succinct, hard-hitting
principles to much longer values that are just too wordy.

We’re not historians of UUism, but our big-picture view is
that the Unitarian tradition includes a strain of hard-headed practical rationalism,
and the Universalist tradition includes a strain of universal love and
inclusion. Those are both very good strains. But we fear the universal-love-and-inclusion
strain has grown at the expense of the hard-headed-rationalism strain, and we
would like to see that balance restored, which we hope our proposals contribute
to.

Have you discussed this idea with your congregation or other UUs?

We have shown this to about a dozen friends at UU Fellowship of San Dieguito. Their response has all been positive. We showed it to our minister as well.

2 Likes
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I agree with your assessment that the more rationalist Unitarian tradition seems to be have been greatly diminished in favor of the loving, inclusive Universalist tradition. The revisions do seem unbalanced in this way.

Another way of looking at it is to see the healthy balance of individual and community broken in favor of community.

I also agree with your criticism of the capitalization of Love and Beloved Community. It makes them seem like religious principles that may not be questioned without actually explicitly saying this. So, yes, this choice is problematic and even somewhat deceptive (in my opinion, of course).