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ROP Spring 2006 Newsletter

                                        American Dreams

This country was built on bold notions that set us on a journey to narrow the gap between our visionary rhetoric and actual practice.  Inclusive democracy, at its simplest, is setting a decision making table where all chairs have ample space to pull up to the table.  Wedge politics of the last decade asked Americans to narrow their definition of who was good enough to pull up to the table by asking that gays be denied a chair.  Now it is immigrants, another historically vulnerable group, that we are asked to bar from the table.  Efforts to constrict democracy often claim that we should just look at the facts.  But we know that in our larger pursuit of democratic ideals, the facts don’t always tell the whole story.  And here is why.

My facts and my neighbors’ facts may never line up. Our facts document the worldview that we ascribe to.  Back in the early 90s, the eyes of the world were upon Oregon as we were the first populace asked to authorize a rewriting of our constitution to exclude a group of people –gays and lesbians.  It was a brutal 18 month campaign.  Hate crimes hit new highs.  People died.  The constitution stood firm but at such a high price.

The ‘Yes’ campaign attempted to roll back civil rights gains at the ballot by dehumanizing gays and lesbians.  Many were tempted to dehumanize those who voted ‘yes’ as simple bigots.  Research showed that the majority who voted for the ballot measure were parents of young children who were scared by the ‘facts’ that the Yes campaign had presented to them that ‘gays and lesbians were pedophiles.’  My set of facts, of course, disputed that.  But are these parents bigots?  Or concerned parents that had been fed a misleading story line?  In some debates, our individual and collective humanity is lost.

Debating civil rights tempts us to make mistakes based on the tensions of the moment.  Just who permitted housing raids terrorizing Chinese immigrants in the hysteria post completion of the railroads?  Just who allowed the rounding up and internment of Japanese-Americans in the 40s?  And just who is allowing secret detentions that violate our own constitution and the Geneva Conventions today?  It’s Americans.  It’s us.   Facts can mislead.  Values rooted in justice and inclusive democracy help us to navigate by our moral compass.  We can then reframe hot button issues into a more eternal questions of what does an inclusive democracy require and how do we speak up for that.  (http://www.rop.org/images/Democracy_grid_front.pdf)

It is sobering to reflect that many of the heroes of the resistance movement during the holocaust were arguably anti-Semites, whether we look at FDR or my grandfather.  It was the norm.  People hid Jews, defied injustice and lost their lives because they were not tempted by the ‘facts’ of the moment (Jews steal babies) but rather stayed firm in their moral compass.  That is what every historical moment requires of people of good will.

Our Rebuild America platform does not mention immigrants or gays and lesbians, instead it is built on the radical notions of inclusive democracy – something that most of us do hold dear, especially when we are released from debating smaller facts designed to obscure our vision.  A reading of the Bill of Rights finds that this country defends ‘persons’ regardless of the cyclical debates over immigrations and citizenship.

ROP has a history of confronting ‘wedge issues’ - issues that are floated to divide our communities and separate us from our common humanity. In the early 1990's, we came together in living rooms across the state to discuss what we were seeing and how we could respond to anti-gay ballot initiatives.  Out of these conversations, local human dignity groups were created.  The human dignity group was set up not only to fight this immediate threat but to advance and defend democracy in an on-going manner.

In 2006, we are still working to unite our communities in the face of wedge issues, but the focus has shifted.  Immigration has become the issue of the day.  As we set forth in our campaign to Rebuild America: the Gulf Coast, the Country and Our Communities, ROP is harkening back to our roots and hosting a series of living room conversations to understand and counter this latest wedge and hold up our vision of inclusive democracy. That’s an America worth dreaming big for!