NEW BLOG!!!!

From this day forth I will not be posting to this blog. Rather, we at the Washington Office have started an office blog! Please add it to your favorites, www.uuawo.blogspot.com.

At the new blog you can read posts from myself as well as Elizabeth, Meredith, Rob and Kat - and in a few months you can read from our new office additions - Grace, Lisa and Alex.

Thanks for your readership and I look forward to hearing from you at http://uuawo.blogspot.com/.

This blog will remain live, but functioning as only an archive.

Randall Tobias' Prostitution Pledge

This blog post by Jodi Jacobson, Director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, sort of knocks the wind out of you and replaces it with a ball of fire... please read:

In the final moments of the Washington work day last Friday evening, emails began shooting across my screen announcing the immediate resignation of Randall Tobias as Director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The official press release cited "personal reasons," and this was clearly important news, so I passed it on to colleagues right away. One immediately wrote back asking for the "back story," on suspicion that a late-Friday release always means something fishy. I offered that Mr. Tobias might have a family emergency, and while I've long been a critic of the policies over which he has presided both as Global AIDS Coordinator and in his current capacity, I nonetheless felt compassion for him in what appeared to be a serious personal matter.

Boy was I wrong. Little did I realize that this was in fact a "back" story . . . Tobias's had been inviting some "gals" over to his condo for personal massages. Problem is those "gals" were employed by Pamela Martin and Associates, described in court papers by owner Deborah Palfrey as a "high-end adult fantasy firm offering legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior." Palfrey, now dubbed the DC Madam, is under investigation for running a "prostitution ring," a no-no last time I understood Administration policy. Tobias's personal cell phone number was found among thousands of other customers, many of them reportedly high-level Washington officials, on a list kept by Palfrey now being used in her defense.

Tobias, of course, claims he "did not have sex with those women" (let's call them "les gals"), and just invited them over for a bunch of friendly massages. Let's put aside whether Tobias simply lusted in his heart while receiving massages from women employed by a firm offering "legal sexual and erotic services," and ask: If tight muscles were the only problem, why didn't he open the yellow pages and hire a certified massage therapist? Is the concierge at his condo on vacation? And does the fact that some of the women were from Central America—immigration status unknown—hint at a new kind of guest worker program supported by the Administration?

Let me be clear: I personally do not care about, nor is it my business to know about, the sexual habits, practices or relationships of consenting adults, and in any case sex between mature, consenting individuals is normal and healthy. But religious fundamentalist self-righteousness and hypocrisy both send me up the wall. And as you may know, Bush and his supporters are really big on abstinence. From sex. Always. In the far-right's anti-science, always-fiction world, you should never have sex, unless you are a married heterosexual willing to do so only at risk of getting pregnant. Others—sexually active unmarrieds, gay, lesbian and transgender persons, and anyone else outside the "norm"—are subject to reprogramming. So since the Bush Administration wants a video cam in every bedroom and uterus (and I have no idea whether Tobias was taping his masseuses but that is another story), it is fair to ask if these guys are practicing what they preach. Apparently not.

This might in fact just have been one more "thank-god-its-Friday" "what next?" Washington story if it weren't for the irony of Tobias' recent career path, in which he was previously the Global AIDS Coordinator, responsible for overseeing the $15 billion President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and now, as Director of all U.S. Foreign Assistance, ultimately responsible for all foreign assistance including HIV/AIDS, reproductive health and family planning and other areas having to do with sex, reproduction, and women's rights.

Abstinence is big in U.S. global AIDS policy, which one colleague dubbed the "Americans for Stopping Sex in Africa League." Billions of dollars have been spent in a fruitless effort at home and abroad to spread a hyper-moralistic and ideological message to everyone and sundry. Programs teaching people sexual negotiation and safer sex methods have become as scarce as rubbers in Uganda. Even sex workers in Asia and Africa are being told to abstain. (Don't ask me . . . it's in the program guides.)

Never mind that unprotected sex is the single greatest factor in the spread of HIV infection worldwide in a global epidemic of unprecedented proportions, and never mind that, as a long list of cell phone numbers from Washington officials indicates, others share my contention that sex is a fundamental part of human life and everyone is trying to get some somewhere.

So enter Tobias who, in both his past and current position, has been and is the ultimate defender and enforcer of some of the most highly controversial policies, including the so-called "ABC" (abstain, be faithful, use-condoms-if-you-are-a-sex-worker-or can't-control yourself) approach to HIV prevention, the prostitution pledge, and the anti-trafficking policies of the Bush Administration. He has repeatedly testified before Congress supporting these policies, regularly using faulty data to support his claims.

Under the "ABC" policy as developed under Tobias' watch, some 11 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have been subject to abstinence-only-until marriage programs, receiving no information, training, or methods to practice safer sex, despite the fact that unprotected sex is responsible for 80 percent of new infections in that region. Condoms have been re-stigmatized and in some programs paid for by your tax dollars, teens actually are told they will go to hell for having sex.

Another 30 million have received "abstinence and be faithful messages"—whatever that means. And whatever it means, either it doesn't work in high-literacy settings in Washington or Tobias, a married man, has not been reading his own literature. I mean, even if no "actual sexual activity" was involved (and in some abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula in the United States even touching constitutes an unforgivable act, so unless Les Gals were using retractable devices for those massages, I am suspicious) do you qualify as "being faithful" when you have private exotic dancers prancing through your apartment? Rick Warren please advise.

But the irony does not stop there. Under the "prostitution pledge," U.S. policy forbids organizations from receiving U.S. global AIDS funding if they refuse to sign a pledge stating that they will not in any way promote or support prostitution. Violating this pledge means loss of funding. This policy, vaguely written and defined as is the pattern of the far right, has led to the closure of drop-in centers, classes, and health clinics serving the needs of sex workers in several countries in Asia, and has turned health professionals into snitches for the Administration. As a result, the trust built up over many years between the public health community and disadvantaged and marginalized groups like sex workers has been demolished, the basic human rights of sex workers abrogated, and efforts to stem the spread of HIV infection grossly undermined.

I may be missing something, but does hiring gals from an organization that promotes itself as selling sexual services contradict this policy? Does the fact that this involved women from another country, thereby possibly violating the anti-trafficking policies of the Bush Administration mean that the USAID uber-Administrator himself is in violation of the laws he is supposed to be upholding, however deeply misguided these are? Does this mean that USAID should de-fund the Administrator's office and do we need a State Department Trafficking in Persons report on the activities of individuals within the Administration? And what about the "end-demand" policies of the Administration that wants to put all "johns" in jail? Does Tobias serve time for his gal-pal flings?

In a saner world, U.S. global AIDS policies (and all those having to do with reproductive and sexual health) would be based on the promotion of individual rights, public health, and collective responsibility. In a saner world, the U.S. government would not be known for its fundamentalist "tighty-whities-in-a-twist" approach to sex.

But we don't live in that world. In our world, people with wealth, money, and power get away with "special massages," they make unrealistic rules for other people and set their own for themselves. And those at greatest risk of life-threatening infections and engaged in a fundamental daily life struggle to survive are punished in the interest of moralism. Give me some real science fiction any day.

Randall Tobias and his former boss.

New Orleans - 19 Months Post-Katrina

Meredith, EB (Elizabeth) and I are in New Orleans as part of an All Souls DC service trip. We are staying at Hands On New Orleans and spending our days gutting homes, painting, and generally rebuilding. In groups we are also taking half-day tours, seeing the extent of the damage and hearing about the waters and then injustice and racism that that have flooded this city for the last 19 months. I have also been reading the local papers and talking to everyone I come across to find out as much as I can.

This is my first trip to a disaster zone and it has been highly emotional. I have been deeply moved not just at times, but in a continually building and almost overwhelming way. Here are some of the stories I have heard, facts I have gleaned, thoughts I have had, and people I have met.

• 250,000 New Orleanians have still not returned to the city which previous to Katrina held around 500,000 people.
• 90% of the city was flooded. That is 90% of the homes as well. To repair a home that sat in water for two weeks you generally have to demold the home (a process that includes lots of chemicals), then you have to throw away nearly everything that was in the home and strip down all the drywall or plaster, pull up the flooring, if there was roof damage then take down the ceiling drywall. Then you essentially have a "gutted" home. Then you can begin rebuilding the interior - putting in new electric and walls and ceilings. Then you can buy furniture and go home. This is a long and very expensive process. Lots of labor, lots of materials, and in many neighborhoods almost every home needs to go through this process in order for folks to come "home".
• Federal Emergency Response Assistance is distributed based on a 1988 law that requires that municipalities requesting federal assistance contribute 10% of costs towards rebuilding and the Federal Government will cover 90%. New Orleans has already accumulated a debt to the federal government of $324 million in just their "10%". Congress wants to waive that debt to enable further rebuilding, Bush does not. That "10%" was waived for NYC after 9/11 and for Florida after Hurricane Andrew. In the Emergency Supplemental passed by both houses of Congress that debt is waived. President Bush plans on vetoing the supplemental bill because it also sets a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq (and he doesn't want to waive the debt in the first place). Also, funding from the government can not be used to improve infrastructure, only to return it to pre-disaster levels. They are balking at funding repairs to the sewer system as they claim it was poorly maintained before hand. Also rebuilding in such a way to reflect changes in population (such as combining schools) is not an option - it has to be the same as before. In the NY times an article used this analogy, if you had a 1981 Toyota Camry with a leaky radiator that was lost in the flood the Federal Government will buy you a 1981 Toyota Camry and punch a hole in the radiator.
• I cleaned out debris from under a home today which is currently owned by Mr. Banks. It used to belong to his aunt who died shortly after the storm. He currently has moved across the river to an area that wasn't flooded. He is a disabled veteran and lost everything in the storm. His daughter has to go to school in Baton Rouge - 100 miles away. He is going to let the Hands-On long term volunteers stay there for six months pro-bono after the home is rebuilt.
• My team leader was Chet. Chet worked got laid off of his factory job in Michigan shortly after the storm and took to drinking heavily. One night he saw some nightly news coverage about the losses that New Orleanians have endured. He remembers thinking, "I thought I had it bad". He sold all his belongings and took a Greyhound to New Orleans with $500 in his pocket last Spring. He has been volunteering at Hands On ever since. Gutting and rebuilding homes. Chet is not alone in his dedication.
• Bree is a member of the First Unitarian Church of New Orleans. She was a renter pre-Katrina and lost everything she owned in the storm. She is handicap. She was given a FEMA trailer that was non-accessible and had to join a class action lawsuit to get an accessible trailer - they won two months ago and she is still awaiting her trailer. She is making due with the non-accessible one. I also learned that the original "accessible" trailers given out after the storm didn't come with ramps, had light switches on the ceiling, and temperature controls under the table.
• Two weeks after Katrina the New Orleans School board voted to turn many of the local public schools into charter schools. Few Schools have reopened, many teachers have retired putting a lot of strain on the city to pay pensions and health care costs with a much smaller tax base.

I have a couple of more days here and am learning more each day. I am truly learning what a disaster is.

Yesterday while touring the city and seeing all the damage I realized I had left my boots and jeans outside to dry from my previous day's sweaty work. I bought $40 sole inserts for my boots a couple of weeks ago and I have pretty nice boots. After realizing that I became somewhat anxious hoping they would still be there when I returned. I jumped out of the van when we got back and sure enough they were sitting there. Relief swept over me until I realized that I had driving past the lives of nearly 450,000 people who came home to find that not only were their boots lost, but so were their hats, their dogs, their favorite recipes, their cars, their walls, their neighbors, and their neighborhoods.

The Moral Balance Sheet

I have spent a better part of the last month working with our Public Witness team to develop a moral balance sheet on the Iraq war. What follows is a letter introdcing it, by Bill Sinkford, and the moral balance sheet itself...

To Members of the United States Congress:

The United States has spent at least $400 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The astronomical cost of these operations is exceeded only by the staggering human toll, and both counts are far beyond what any of us could have imagined when we invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003. Now, four years later, the administration is asking you to approve $100 billion to prolong this disastrous conflict and to return exhausted soldiers to a dangerous and embittered land.

While this money would allow our nation to send more brave citizens into harm’s way, it would do little to guarantee that they will be fully trained and equipped, or that our wounded veterans will receive adequate medical treatment once they return home. And the increased funding does nothing to ensure a speedy end to the carnage in Iraq. We have already failed our troops in so many tragic ways. The best way to support them now is to bring them home and to ensure that they and their families are given all of the respect, compensation, and care they deserve.

Rather than a surge of troops, we American taxpayers deserve a surge of truth.
Because citizens of all faiths and political persuasions are being asked to pay to prolong the violence, it is our moral obligation to reckon the true cost of the war before we agree to continue it. To give a true reckoning, we must honestly confront what we have done in Iraq, and we also must acknowledge the many vital needs we have left unfunded because we chose to put our money toward war.

Until we can adequately prepare and protect our troops, until we can provide them with premium medical services when they return home, and until we can guarantee a speedy and just end to the Iraq conflict, I urge you not to spend another American dollar on this war. I hope you will take a moment to review the enclosed balance sheet. These concerns are neither Republican nor Democratic. They transcend partisan differences. They are moral concerns that affect all of us.

Sincerely,

William G. Sinkford
President, Unitarian Universalist Association

The True Cost of War: A Moral Balance Sheet

One Day in Iraq
To date, more than 3,100 American military members have been killed in Iraq, and another 400 have been killed in Afghanistan. On average, another college-aged soldier (between the ages of 18 and 22) is killed every day.

The money the US spends on average in just one day in Iraq, $259 million, could have provided 22,615 college-aged students with a full year’s tuition or enrolled 35,500 three- and four-year-olds a full year in Head Start pre-school programs.

One Week in Iraq
The toll of the war on Iraqi civilians has been devastating. Estimates of the number of Iraqi dead range up to half a million.

As many as 3.8 million Iraqis have already fled their homes, and an additional 10,500 civilians become refugees on average every week.

The money spent in one week in Iraq could have provided three meals a day for nearly an entire year for 6 million children, the same number that dies from hunger and malnutrition every year.

One Month in Iraq
In addition to the tens of thousands of injuries American service members have sustained in fighting in Iraq, more than 500 have undergone “major amputations” – the loss of arms or legs. In the four years of fighting in Iraq, that totals ten servicemen and women losing a limb every month (or one every three days).

For less than the amount spent in one month in Iraq, New Orleans’ neighborhoods could be completely rebuilt and improved to meet standards that would better protect them against another hurricane.

One Year in Iraq
More than 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in Iraq in 2006 alone. That is equivalent to 93 civilians killed every day.

The money spent in Iraq in one year could have paid the health insurance premiums for half of all uninsured Americans, including all uninsured American children.

Four years in Iraq
More than 3,100 American service members have been killed since the invasion, and more than 23,500 soldiers have been wounded. As many as 300,000 veterans have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, two-thirds of whom are not being treated.

What could we have purchased with $400 billion, had our national priorities matched our moral potential?

We could have funded full American compliance in the Kyoto Protocol, which is estimated to cost $75 billion less than what we’ve already spent in Iraq.

We could have purchased life-giving treatment, including costly antiretroviral drugs, for every person in the world infected with HIV/AIDS. For almost six full years.

The Years Ahead
Even if it ends tomorrow, we will be paying for this war for decades to come. When we factor in the future costs of veterans’ medical care, disability payments, and the price of rebuilding our depleted military, the total cost could exceed $1.2 trillion.

Imagine what our world might look like in a few years if we had focused those resources on making the world healthier, wealthier, better educated, and safer.

As Americans, it is our duty to hold ourselves and our government accountable for any decision to spend American lives and money on a futile war. These are moral choices, and they have moral consequences.


© Unitarian Universalist Association, 2007. References and source material are available upon request. This document maybe be reproduced in its entirety and freely distributed. When material is excerpted we ask only that it be attributed to the UUA.

Cross-Cultural Conference

From February 8th through 11th I was in Savannah attending the Southeastern Regional Conference on Cross-Cultural Issues for Educators and Counselors. It was a fascinating program featuring a presentation by Derald Wing Sue on racial microaggressions and another by William Cross Jr. on Ethnic, Racial, and Cultural Identity Across the Lifespan.

Derald Wing Sue spoke about making the invisible visible. The term racial microaggression is meant to describe instances when racial undertones are present in interpersonal relations, such as calling a black man "articulate" or telling an Asian-American that "you speak very good English" - "OF COURSE I DO! I was born here!"

Dr. Sue explained that these are the most common forms of racism in our modern age and they are very troublesome. Racial microaggressions create a hostile and invalidating climate, sap spiritual and psychic energy, and can lead to depression and frustration. Those that witness or experience microaggressions must struggle with the difficult questions "how do I respond to this", "did that really just happen", and after the fact "how should I have handled that". And these situations can be even further complicated by the dynamics in which they take place... what do you do when a teacher or a boss commits a micoraggression?

The last presentation of the conference was that of William Cross Jr. He spent a great deal of time criticizing the "post-traumatic slave syndrome". He countered the notion that problems faced by the black community such as high incarceration rates and broken families are caused by the legacy of slavery. He argued that such a position is seductive and dangerous and that "blaming slavery is intellectual laziness". He had us break into groups and discuss the "legacy of slavery" - after we shared the destructive elements we saw as the legacy, he agreed with us and then went on to talk about how black music grew out of slavery - spirituals, jazz, blues... He also talked about how immediately after slavery blacks wandered the country looking for their families and set up "Sabbath Schools" to educate their youth. He showed that from the end up slavery up until the 1960's 70% of black families were two parent households. He argued that slavery is not necessarily to blame for the problems currently facing the black community, rather, he said, we should look at contemporary structural issues that have negatively affected the black community.

As an example he spoke of the drug laws in Virginia. Previous to 1985 70% of those in prison were white - reflecting the proportions in the greater population. In 1985 Virginia revised their drug laws giving stiffer penalties to crack users than to those who used pot or cocaine... since that law was passed more and more black men were sent to prison, and now there are more black men than whites in Virginia prisons. Crack, cocaine, and pot are all illegal - the biggest difference between them is that crack is most present in the poor black community and pot and cocaine are more commonly found in the white community.

I also attended workshops on "hip-hop, race and class" and "white male identity development". Below are some quotes and statistics I scribbled down during my workshops and the presentations that I found interesting, funny, and/or inspiring:

"50% of people of color terminate counseling after one session, only 30% of whites do the same".

"If you don't open up the can does it mean that the worms aren't there?"

Black Mother to Child - "What do you do WHEN you are stopped by the police/security?"

"George Bush was born on third base and believes he hit a triple."

"Power is in a group's ability to define reality"

"Rap is something that you do, hip-hop is something that you are."

"Don't say 'I'm racist but so is everyone', say 'I'm racist and I'm committed to justice'."

"When there is no clear cut answer live the question."

Washington Redskins?

This past week our office read an article on racism in a culture of violence by George Tinker for our weekly Theological Reflection. A large part of that article looked at the specific racism faced by Native Americans. Talk about a hard history to face. Massacres, expulsion, plagues, neglect, oppression, and now they have become mascots.

Can you imagine what it would be like to live as a Native American, completely aware of the history between the United States and your people and to see your people being used as mascots!!! Especially as the mascot for the football team of the Nation's Capital: The Washington Redskins. The REDSKINS!!!!

More Peace... please

In the middle of the day today I decided to run some figures on the Iraq war as part of a UUA messaging campaign looking at the "Moral Balance" of this war. What I found was truly disturbing...

Our Congress has appropriated nearly $365 billion dollars for the war in Iraq since it began. With that money we could have done all of the following:

• Double the number of teachers we currently have in our public schools;
• Build a public housing unit for each homeless person in America;
• Provide health insurance for every uninsured child in America;
• Give $85,000 to each of the 1 million persons displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Or we could have provided full four-year scholarships for every undergraduate student in America.

With these rather heavy thoughts on my mind, I wrote this introduction to our advocacy news mailing list today:

On Saturday, Adam Gerhardstein and Elizabeth Bukey joined 800 Unitarian Universalists and 500,000 Americans marching for Peace. It was a beautiful day to spend in the company of people who are passionate about their country and compassionate with the world. But it is also such a luxury to be able to gather in opposition to a government's policy. One must think of the thousands of Darfurians who have died at the hands of their government, or the thousands of Iraqis who have died and the millions of others who fear to go out in public and face the terror of yet another public bombing. Even in our times of anger, frustration, and protest we are privileged.

With that in mind please take the time to exercise that privilege in the most responsible way. The action items below will help you reach out to your Representatives and to your fellow Americans, giving you an opportunity to share your deepest convictions in the hopes that we can make this world a more peaceful and just place.