Category Archives: Signs of the Times

David McReynolds: Peace Movement Titan Is Gone

I only sort of knew David McReynolds, but he hovered significantly in the background of peace work during my apprenticeship in the Vietnam years.

David McReynolds, pacifist organizer stalwart, October 25, 1929- August 17, 2018.
My most vivid memory of David was not a personal encounter, but in the pages of WIN Magazine, a “radical pacifist” journal published by the War Resisters League. In 1969 he joined several other elder eminences in coming out there. These were the first confrontations I had had with homosexuals as sympathetic figures and colleagues.

His article was more personal than political, often embarrassed about how much his struggles in and out of the closet had cut into his driving impulse to organize nonviolent action against war and imperialism. Its candor and humility cut right through my unthinking, reflexive homophobia, pointing a way forward from it which I have worked ever since to follow.

Friends Central School Lawsuit: The Fired Teachers Begin to Make Their Case

“At first blush, this matter deals simply with a motion to dismiss a civil rights case with pendent claims as Defendants claim protection under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S Constitution. However, the attack amounts to something much more, something dangerously precedent-setting were it to be approved, namely that a private school and those affiliated with it are exempt from the reach of Federal and State Civil Rights Acts. This is all despite Friends Central’s professed adherence to notions of responsibility, equality and diversity. When the rubber meets the road, these Defendants are insisting that they are untouchable and above it all.

However, Defendants fail any applicable test. In no way do Plaintiffs’ claims require inquiry into religious tenets of Quakerism. Plaintiffs do not make any claims or counts based therein. Rather, Plaintiffs Complaint references guidelines and policies set forth by the school so as to depict the environment in which Plaintiffs worked and to justify their adherence to those guidelines and policies. . . .

Should this Court accept Defendants’ arguments, then there is nothing to keep any purportedly religious school from claiming immunity from the Civil Rights laws, or any other laws for that matter, taking us back to the dark ages in American jurisprudence. . . .

New Split, Old Issue: Same Sex Marriage Rends Wilmington YM

(AFL): Let me try to be clear on this: was the key point of contention at WYM, at least as stated, not the issue of same sex marriage itself, but more what the YM should do about meetings that were willing to tolerate being in a yearly meeting where some other meetings do support same sex marriage? [Note: An extensive collection of minutes from meetings in WYM is in Attachment #4: : INDIVIDUAL MEETING STATEMENTS ON SAME SEX MARRIAGE AND/OR WYM UNITY” of the 2017 WYM Minutes, online in full here.]

SA: Great question. While that seems generally to be true, let me hasten to add that, among the constellation of areas of disagreement, there is no consensus among the Friends staying and those disaffiliating as to which area of disagreement is paramount. Many Friends disaffiliating see the lack of fidelity to a literal interpretation of Scripture, at least as they understand it, as a paramount issue. When addressing the grounds for the current set of disagreements, an initial draft of the WYM Epistle specified that “Biblical interpretation is at the heart of our uneasiness and distrust.”

Dandruff on the Boss’s shoulder: Friends Central School Strikes Back

The FCS attorneys are from a heavyweight Philadelphia firm (three names before the ampersand), and on June 3, they submitted a motion for dismissal of the lawsuit, and a supporting memorandum of law. (The full text is here.) In the memorandum, they spend 29 pages asserting, in numerous carefully-phrased ways, that “There’s nothing to see here — and you shouldn’t be looking at it anyway.”

Why not? Because, the biggest objection is that all the plaintiffs’ complaints are essentially religious, and thus out of bounds for civil courts . . .