Mike called for the UU community to speak out for justice. But during the dialogue following the sermon, hearing fellow-parishioners’ comments on laziness and cheating among public assistance beneficiaries, I wondered whether that advocacy can be possible.

Blaming the victim can be so comforting. It relieves us not only of feeling guilty but of worrying that another’s misfortune might just as well happen to us. Of course, laziness and cheating can be found in all walks of life. The welfare recipient who gets a wide-screen TV is only more conspicuous, and an easier target for demagogues’ outrage, than the millionaire or billionaire who finds ways to avoid not only paying taxes but giving anything back to the society that gives them so much.

For those who are angry about any undeserved services government and/or charities may bestow, how about asking yourself who you would deny help to by cutting back those things? What children would you let go hungry; who would you make homeless? If you disbelieve such consequences, try opening your eyes, ears and mind.

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I want to feel positive that in our mostly-non-diverse denomination, the majority made this concession to make a minority feel more welcome, and that the issue is finally put to rest after 15 years of debating it – making room, we may hope, for more pressing issues.

Yet it still bothers me. Trying to put oneself in others’ shoes is always dicey, but as a woman, I would NOT want the name Albert Einstein sandblasted out of history because he failed dismally as a husband and father (which he did), or William Shakespeare’s name because he wrote “Taming of the Shrew.” Their contributions to humanity cannot be questioned. I would not even support a campaign to change the name of JMU’s iconic “Wilson Hall” based on President Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to suppress women’s suffrage advocates. And I consider myself a feminist, though not a feminist ideologue. (“Ideologues,” to me, mean those who try to divide humanity between the purely good and purely evil, and cram the complex, messy, rich, varied whole of life into any ideological box, and ban books or blow up statues or airbrush faces out of photos of whoever or whatever doesn’t fit the box.)

TJ (as we called him in Charlottesville) was deeply flawed and did not transcend his time when it came to ownership of fellow human beings. (Ditto for some of my own ancestors and those of plenty of other UU’s. What are we to do with them?) Yet Jefferson did more than any of the nation’s other founders to establish those radical and still-challenged policies of church-state separation and religious freedom. I don’t know of any UU’s not supporting or benefiting from them – so it’s sad that we had to purge TJ. It’s sad and STRANGE that we did this the same year the Texas Board of Education decided to mostly cut him out of that state’s public school curriculum – THEIR reason being his advocacy of church-state separation (coupled with his avowed, generally “Unitarian” beliefs).

I hope we don’t pat ourselves on the backs for this move, but get on with working for meaningful change in our troubled society and world. And maybe wonder, if humanity does evolve morally and spiritually, what unexamined traditions or habits WE have that future generations could condemn us for – provided they have not evolved enough by then to forgive us!