A Friendly Letter

Dog Days & Chicks: “Ain’t had a prayer since I don’t know when . . . .”

I caught up with the Dixie Chicks in Raleigh, and couldn’t get enough. But that was not all: there were two special, non-musical bonuses in their Tarheel gig:

One was a give-back. Since this is the summer of the notorious HB2, the Chicks had to think about whether to cancel the show, as Springsteen, Itzhak Perlman and so many other top-flight artists have.

They didn’t cancel, but took time to make plain where their sympathies lay: they passed out thousands of free hats with a special label, and mocked the absurdity of the bathroom law between songs.

North Carolina YM Split: Stick A Fork In It

Two big benefits of this decision were immediately evident, at least to this writer: for the liberals, it seemed to definitively squash the purge effort. Stuck a fork in it. They can now stop wasting their time wondering if they’ll be kicked out of NCYM in a month or two.

For the uneasy evangelicals, they finally got some space, some daylight, between them and the liberals: they won’t have their own YM, but they will have their own brand. Now when questions come up about such strange liberal notions as, say, being friendly to LGBTs, or against the newest wars, they can simply jerk a thumb leftward and say, “That’s not us, it’s those Prius Friends. We’re with the Pickup Quakes.” (Or would it be the NPR Quakes and the Fox fans? UNC or Duke? Kale or collards? Ketchup or vinegar? Texas Pete or Sriracha? I must be hungry. Send us your suggestions!)

Twisting Again at Baltimore YM

Coffeehouse” is an annual Saturday Night tradition at Baltimore Yearly Meeting, where I’m still a member. It features silly skits and other such let-down-thy-hair amateur amusements.

This year I joined in one dreamed up by my co-star & co-conspirator Michael Newheart.

To get a sense of our public foolishness, check out this 9-minute video, and twist again like we did last summer (or maybe 50 summers ago)!

Carolina Quakers: One Creed? Two Creeds? Or None?

In North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM), the ongoing effort to purge liberal meetings currently takes the form of an effort to “divide” the body into two “new” YMs, (This “plan” is described in detail, with links to the relevant documents, here.)

The NCYM Ministry & Counsel has prepared a draft of the “Doctrinal Basis for Two Yearly Meetings,” which is copied in full below. “Doctrinal Basis” amounts to a summary creed.

But this summary creed fails to address the real pointed at issue in this struggle.

Bait & Switch – The Carolina Quaker Steamroller Cranks Up

Actually, my sense is that it already is a done deal. That the fix was in became evident when strong dissents were voiced by three EC members to the initial plan in June, they were shouldered aside.
Who are we kidding? The dice are loaded; the deck is stacked.

And the fix was in well before June. It surfaced last November, as reported here, when the same Executive Committee ( http://wp.me/p5FGIu-14w ) stated to the Representatives that:

“Past years and particularly the events of the last fourteen months have made it increasingly clear that positions and actions adopted by a very few meetings are serving to create much of the discord and unrest that we experience in North Carolina Yearly Meeting. These continued statements, positions and actions are threatening the very existence of North Carolina Yearly Meeting as we know it today.”

That is to say, the EC repeated and joined the push from Yadkin Quarter and other like-minded groups, which had surfaced in the summer of 2014, demanding the exclusion of “liberal” Friends and the “progressive” meetings.