@Judith Barisonzi
The current UU bylaws read: “The primary purpose of the Association is to serve the needs of its member congregations, organize new congregations, extend and strengthen Unitarian Universalist institutions and implement its principles.” Would that suffice? Or would you propose changing that?
It seems to me that the Article II commission has had trouble clearly articulating why we really need to change the bylaws so drastically right now. They wrote this as their justification in their FAQ:
Unitarian Universalism is a living tradition that learns and adapts to meet the needs of each generation. It’s been nearly 40 years since a comprehensive review and revision of Article II. The digital age has shifted our interactions with community and truth. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted our interdependence, and where individualism falls short. There is a rise in global autocracies and attacks on democratic institutions, and climate catastrophe and mass extinctions threaten the delicate balance of the web of life. These are just a few of the major struggles our living tradition must face today and in our future. With the articulation of our shared UU values, we can be better equipped to make values based decisions in facing these new and evolving realities.
None of this seems to clarify (to me at least) exactly why one would make each of the many changes that they made nor why each of them seemed necessary nor why the existing structure seems so insufficient to address issues today (except for very specific issues such as changing “men and women” to “people”).
I don’t personally feel strongly either way but I suspect that in the midst of confusion one often turns to changing words… because we can.
A carpenter I knew used to say to people who talked smack to him, “Now you’ve done the easy part” (meaning the talk part as opposed to the hard part: backing up the words with action).
It seems to me that in the face of many challenges organizationally, societally, interpersonally, and within congregations, many of us instinctively want to “do the easy part”. Yet, whatever wording UUs choose, the “hard part” of actually embodying diversity, combatting systemic oppression, and dismantling racism, classism, heteronormativism, ableism, specieism, the addiction industrial complex, ecological devastation, militarism, and patriarchy, all remain. We’ll find no quick fix regardless of the wording we choose (or exclude).
For the heck of it, I figured I’d link here to a non-exhaustive list of a variety of posts that have (more or less) called to scrap the revisions altogether:
#27
#339
#185
#170
#128
#307
#212
#306
#165
#312
#346
#290
#236
#190
#309
#184
#160
#149
#227
#260
#296
#291
#282
#238
#275
#269
#234
#226
#42
#162
#30
#205
#145
#52
#41
#140
#134
#120
#119
#116
#63
#40
#39
#32
#132
#121
Whew!
(And no, I cannot explain why more people did not consolidate same or similar proposals under one topic rather than introducing them as new ones. But it does indicate that a sizable portion of the participants on this forum outright oppose adoption of the Article II revision in anything like its current form …or at all).