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The Blessings of Liberty
A Sermon Given
by Reverend Roger Fritts
on November 3, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Fifty years ago the FBI and local police maintained files on some
Unitarian ministers. Under the Freedom of Information Act some of
my colleagues have obtained copies of their FBI files. For example, in
May of 1951 an FBI special agent recorded the following:
A man called the Boston Office and talked with me.
He said he is a member of the Unitarian Church,
Wayland, Mass. He stated that about November,
1950, Mr. Raymond Manker became minister of that
church. Since he has assumed that position, he has
impressed his parishioners as being a brilliant man but
with extreme ideas along social lines.
The man was particularly suspicious of Mr. Manker because Manker seemed to be strongly opposed to the Government's position so far as the war in Korea is concerned. Manker has made the statement that the American people should resist in every way anything the government should do relating to war. He urged non-participation in such activities.
On 5/27/51, at the morning service he invited a young man to the pulpit to speak. This was the Sunday given over to the church high school group, of which the young man was a member. The young man talked about 20-25 minutes and his talk was in substance a tirade against capitalism. He quoted Theodore Parker, said money is the root of all evil, criticized the government's policies concerning relief, and said that the government's policy with regard to India was based on imperialism rather than humanitarianism....
[The man] further stated that Mr. Manker has antagonized many people in the church as he has associated almost exclusively with the so-called ultra liberals among the membership, to the exclusion of others. The church has suffered greatly since Manker came there because of this split in the membership.
He described the subject as follows: Name, Raymond Manker. Age, 26 or 27. Height, 5 foot ten and a half inches. Weight 145 pounds. Build, slim. Eyes unknown color. Hair, black. Complexion, fair.... Peculiarities, wears glasses, dark rimmed; no mustache....
In 1963 Ray Manker became the minister of the Phoenix Unitarian
Universalist Church where I grew up, and he is now retired. His FBI
file included a number of other accounts of his ministry over the years.
We know from the Freedom of Information Act that in the 1950s and
1960s the FBI kept files on a number of liberal clergy.
Local police also had what came to be called "Red Squads," divisions
within police departments set up to look for Communist subversives.
They also investigated Unitarian Universalist Churches. The Unitarian
Church of Evanston, Illinois, where I served as the minister in the
1980s, was investigated repeatedly in the 1950s and 1960s.
The church manager who worked in the church office in the 1950s
and 1960s (The church manager was still working for the Evanston
church when I arrived in 1985.) told me that one night the Board
Chair had asked her to stay late because an ex-Red Squad was going
to come in and tell some things about the church. This former police
officer told the church manager and the Board Chair that the Red
Squad had watched everything that was going on in the church, every
meeting, every program. The church manager's office had been
broken into many times, and the many repairs to the door had cost
more than the door. The former police officer told the Board Chair
and the church manager that the police had broken in to see if the
church had any secret records. They broke into the church safe. The
police officer was assigned to watch a church protest march. He said
that he looked around and realized that the church members all looked
like his mother! So he quit the police, and came to the church and
confessed his sins.
Unitarians have traditionally been strongly opposed to government
attempts to restrict freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Indeed, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, Roger
Baldwin, was Unitarian.
Roger Baldwin was born in1884 in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.
Baldwin's parents were members of the Unitarian Church of
Wellesley Hills. Baldwin said:
I learned as a child that we Unitarians were advanced people and that the other churches were backward. They believed things we Unitarians knew were not so. But we were tolerant. We never said so.
The teachings of the Unitarian Church encouraged Baldwin to look
outward and to help others. "As I look back," he said when he was
ninety-two years old,
I would say that social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old and I started to do things that I thought would help people.... Around me it was an accepted assumption that you had to help the underdog -- that you have a moral obligation to help people on the bottom. My grandmother's pastor was Dr. Edward Everett Hale, a gentleman who started a society called "lend a hand" to help people who couldn't help themselves. A group of us children banded together at our Unitarian Church to join the "Lend a Hand Society." I took it all quite seriously.
Baldwin earned a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Anthropology
from Harvard University and on the advice of the family lawyer,
Louis Brandeis, he took a position teaching sociology at Washington
University in St. Louis. In 1920, as a result of his experiences during
World War I, Baldwin decided to found an organization dedicated to
the preservation of civil liberties.
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded January 20, 1920.
Roger Baldwin said:
Up to then there had been only scattered civil liberties movements. This was the first time the wholesale attack on civil liberties forced a nonpartisan defense of the principles of the Bill of Rights.
Sixty-four persons--including Helen Keller, the Rev. Norman Thomas
(a Presbyterian minister), Felix Frankfurter, and Rev. John Haynes
Homes (minister of the Unitarian Community Church in New York
City) served on the first Board of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Baldwin served as the Executive Director, a position he held for thirty
years.
Roger Baldwin's own view of the purpose of the new organization
arose directly out of his Christian Unitarian background. He said:
I support civil liberties because I accept the Christian underdog doctrine that to make democracy work you have to have due process and fair trials to protect the rights of the humblest citizen.
The relationship between religion and government became a major
focus of the ACLU in its first years. In one case the ACLU went to
court when the chief of police in San Francisco made it known that he
would not allow any person to deny the existence of God in a public
place. The most famous church-state case was the Scopes Monkey
trial in which the ACLU defended the right of a teacher in Tennessee
to teach about evolution in the public schools. The ACLU lost the
case and was not able to get the Supreme Court to rule against such
teaching restrictions until 1968.
Freedom of religion was the issue in World War II when two thousand
Jehovah's Witnesses children were expelled from school for refusing
to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Jehovah's Witnesses believe it is a sin
to take an oath of loyalty to any person or institution other than God.
Their children were attacked and abused because they refused to say
the Pledge to the flag; they were ordered out of schools and as they
walked home. Adults and other children shouted and jeered at them.
In one town, a Jehovah's Witness church was burned. In Wyoming,
Jehovah's Witnesses were tarred and feathered. In Nebraska, one was
castrated.
The ACLU took up the cause of these children as a religious freedom
case. Civil liberties' lawyers argued that this was the religious bigotry
and intolerance; the founders wanted to outlaw when they guaranteed
freedom of religion in the Constitution. In the middle of World War
II, the Supreme Court ruled that under the Constitution of the United
States children could not be expelled from school if they refused to
say the Pledge of Allegiance because of religious reasons.
Also during World War II, the ACLU went to work for the thousands
of Japanese Americans who were placed in detention camps. The
ACLU was the only national organization to condemn the internment
and fight it in court. The ACLU said that the detention of Japanese
Americans was an act of war, hysteria, and racism. Many complained
that the ACLU was unpatriotic and disloyal to the nation. It took
forty-six years, but the nation saw things the way the ACLU saw them
in 1942. In 1988 Ronald Reagan signed a bill in which the government
gave reparations to the Japanese Americans and their descendants
who were victims of this detention. In signing the bill the President
called the detention camps an act of war, hysteria, and racism, using
the same words the ACLU had used forty-six years ago.
In 1950 at the age of sixty-five, Baldwin retired from the position of
Director of the ACLU, yet the organization has continued. I have
been a member all my adult life. The organization's philosophy and
actions are a natural outgrowth of my religious beliefs.
Now our nation is in another time of great fear and anxiety. The 1920s
and the 1950s were the eras of the Red Scares. In the 1940s people
were afraid of the Japanese Americans. Today we are afraid of Arabs
and Moslems.
The USA Patriot Act was passed by Congress only a few weeks after
September 11. The Act all but eliminates judicial supervision of
telephone and internet surveillance. It greatly expands the
government's ability to conduct secret searches. Under the USA
Patriot Act government agents can enter a home or office with a
search warrant when the occupant is away, take photographs and
remove property without informing the occupant until afterwards. It
grants the FBI access to sensitive medical, mental health, financial,
and educational records about individuals without having to show
evidence of a crime and without a court order. How often are such
searches conducted? Last month the FBI again refused to say publicly
the number of times it has ordered libraries, bookstores or newspapers
to divulge records. It refused to say publicly the number of citizens or
permanent residents who have been subject to new surveillance orders
since the enactment of the Patriot Act.
The TIPS program, which stands for Terrorism Information and
Prevention System is set up to turn local cable, gas or electrical
technicians and others with regular access to private homes, into spies
for the government. Protests by the ACLU and others have caused
the government to scale back this plan, but the administration still
plans to implement the program in some form.
Federal Executive Orders by President Bush have established military
tribunals to try suspected terrorists. These tribunals bypass the system
of trial by jury, giving a few people extraordinary power to decide an
individual's fate.
Another Executive Order has undercut the principle of attorney client
privilege by allowing the government to wiretap and listen in on
lawyers' conversations with prisoners suspected of terrorism.
Attorney General Ashcroft has loosened guidelines put in place after
the FBI excesses of the 1950s and 60s. Today FBI agents may again
infiltrate houses of worship without evidence of criminal activity.
In the past year the government detained more than 1,200 people,
virtually all of them Arab, South Asian or Muslim, and refused to
release their names, charges, or where they were being held. The U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service held closed deportation
hearings for many of these persons. Though most of the detainees are
now believed to have been deported on immigration charges, or have
been allowed to leave the country voluntarily, the government
continues to fight court orders to conduct open hearings.
Some are speaking out. This week the Takoma Park City Council
adopted a resolution protesting federal measures that violate civil
liberties. Takoma Park joins with eleven other cities across the
country that have adopted resolutions protesting repressive federal
actions. The Takoma Park resolution tells their local law enforcement
officers not to spy on political or religious activities in their
community without evidence of crime.
The United States has changed a great deal in the years since these
events. In the past year I, my wife, and my children have been
physically searched at least a dozen times. At airports I have
unbuckled my belt, taken off my shoes, and strangers have looked
through the dirty laundry in my suitcase. And I want the police to
search me! I want them to search everyone who is getting on the
airplane with me.
On the other hand, I also agree with the resolution passed this week
by the Takoma Park City Council. I plan to write to our County
Council and suggest that they follow the Takoma Park example. There
are things that can be done to prevent another September 11, such as
strengthening cockpit doors, supplying cabin crews with non-lethal
stun guns, and installing systems that allow a plane to be landed
remotely by an air traffic controller. But giving police the powers in
the USA Patriot Act will not make us any safer. It does invite the
same civil liberties' abuses that took place in the 1920s, the 1940s,
and the 1950s.
A new Congress is about to be elected. I hope that some of the fear,
anxiety, and anger that dominated all political decisions a year ago,
has started to be replaced by a calmer reason, as represented by the
vote in Takoma Park, and in eleven other cities. I hope a national
backlash is emerging as a reaction to the erosion of our civil liberties
over the past year.
Roger Baldwin said:
I support civil liberties because I accept the Christian
underdog doctrine that to make democracy work you
have to have due process and fair trials to protect the
rights of the humblest citizen.
In January of 1981 there was another man in the White
House. In one of his last acts the President of the United
States, Jimmy Carter awarded Roger Baldwin, our nation's
highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom.
Baldwin died eight months later, at the age of ninety-seven.
Funeral services were held at the Unitarian Community
Church in New York City. His short statement in accepting
the Medal of Freedom are fitting words to end with this
morning. He said to all of us:
Never yield your courage. Your courage to live, your courage to fight, to resist, to develop your own lives, to be free.
Never yield your courage.
Office@CedarLane.org
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