UUA Trustee Paul Rickter Of The Arlington Street Church In Boston Gets A Little Blast From His Past Courtesy Of The Emerson Avenger
Yet another questionable Unitarian*Universalist church record which is now "open to scrutiny". . .
My Boston TEA Party targeted the Arlington Street Church primarily because it is a prominent downtown Boston Unitarian*Universalist Church with some rather questionable history, but AFA*I*AC the more than two year old email string reproduced below is as good a reason as any for The Emerson Avenger to protest in front of the Arlington Street Church with picket signs saying -
UNSAFE SECT?
and
UNITARIANS AFFIRM & PROMOTE ABUSIVE CLERGY
No U*Us?
Re: Restorative Justice For UU Clergy Misconduct Victims
Saturday, February 3, 2007 5:18 PM
From: "Paul Rickter"
To: "Robin Edgar"
Cc: "Bill Sinkford", "William Sinkford" , "Kathleen Montgomery"
Dear Mr. Edgar,
The UUA Board of Trustees is not an appellate body. The Board sets up systems that handle matters like yours and that system has rendered its decision on your complaints. Any further communication will again be forwarded to the UUA staff for its review.
In Faith,
Paul Rickter, UUA Secretary
At 04:29 PM 1/31/2007 -0500, Robin Edgar wrote:
> Dear Mr. Rickter,
>
> I somehow failed to notice your response to my recent email to the UUA's Board of Trustees until now. I am not quite sure how I managed to overlook it but I somehow failed to see it in my inbox until clearing out unwanted emails today. I am responding to you now and I will be sending this response to every member of the UUA's Board of Trustees to ensure that they are all aware of my response.
>
> My email was addressed to the UUA Board of Trustees precisely because I have virtually no confidence in the "appropriate members of the UUA staff" who are supposed to responsibly handle clergy misconduct complaints. This should have been abundantly clear from the content of my email of January 18th, 2007. The whole point of that email which was addressed to all the members of the UUA Trustees, and a few top level UUA officials such as President Bill Sinkford, was to call upon the Board of Trustees to responsibly intervene in the serious matters that I brought to the attention of all UUA Trustees in that email. I am thus not sure how forwarding my email to "appropriate members of the UUA staff" will accomplish anything productive.
>
> I have heard absolutely nothing from any UUA staff since I sent my email to the UUA Board of Trustees and, quite frankly, I do not realistically expect to hear from any "appropriate members of the UUA staff" as a result of your forwarding of my email to them. I will none-the-less ask you to identify exactly which "appropriate members of the UUA staff" you forwarded my email to so I may know who the UUA Board of Trustees consider to be responsible in this matter. Please forgive me for saying so but I believe that the UUA Board of Trustees is simply passing the buck back to UUA staff members who have clearly proven themselves to be quite disinterested in providing any genuine restorative justice rather than doing what is necessary to begin living up to UUA President Bill Sinkford's Holiday Message calling upon UUs to rededicate themselves to what he terms "waging peace" within the UU world. I am seeking responsible intervention and appropriate action on the part of the members of the UUA Board of Trustees with respect to the matters that I brought to the attention of Trustees in my email of January 18th. The "appropriate members of the UUA staff" are aware of my clergy misconduct complaints and have quite evidently failed, indeed thay have effectively refused, to provide any genuine restorative justice as per clearly stated UUA clergy misconduct policies.
>
> The fact of the matter is that I am by no means the only victim of clergy misconduct who has been very poorly served by "appropriate members of the UUA staff". Other victims of clergy misconduct, including victims of clergy sexual misconduct, have yet to be provided with the "restorative justice" that the UUA promised to provide to victims of clergy misconduct several years ago now. I had meant to bring the UUA Trustees attention to a new blog that deals with the UUA's failure to provide genine restorative justice to victims of clergy sexual misconduct in my email but forgot to do so. I am doing so now.
>
> The title of the blog is - Speaking Truth To Power
>
> How Unitarian Universalists address clergy misconduct
>
> although it might be more appropriately be sub-titled -
>
> How Unitarian Universalists fail to address clergy misconduct
>
> The URL of the blog is -http://uutruth.blogspot.com/index.html
>
> The blog is written by a female victim of clergy sexual misconduct who is well acquainted with UUA policies and procedures and has actively participated in UUA programs intended to revise and improve those policies and procedures. This woman knows very well from considerable personal experience of the "system" that the UUA continues to fail to live up to the solemn promises about "restorative justice" that it made to victims of clergy sexual misconduct several years ago now. Her 'Speaking Truth To Power' blog would not even exist if she believed that the UUA was living up to its clearly stated policies and promises. Besides the fact that there continue to be serious problems with the existing UUA procedures for dealing with clergy misconduct of all kinds, the fact of the matter is that the "appropriate members of the UUA staff" have clearly failed, and have even outright refused, to responsibly implement those existing procedures that could lead to what the UUA terms "restorative justice".
>
> Simply put the "appropriate members of the UUA staff" have failed to live up to the solemn promises aka "covenants" that the UUA has made about providing restorative justice to victims of clergy misconduct. I have yet to receive anything even remotely resembling restorative justice for the verbally and psychologically abusive clergy misconduct that I have complained about to "appropriate members of the UUA staff" in the past and I have very good reason to believe that other victims of clergy misconduct, including victims of clergy sexual misconduct, have been poorly served by the UUA. I expect the UUA Board of Trustees to responsibly act upon the serious concerns that I have shared with UUA Trustees in my email of January 18th, 2007 to say nothing of the contents of an earlier email that I sent to the Board of Trustees a few years ago now.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Robin Edgar
>
>
> Paul Rickter wrote:
> Robin,
>
> Thank you for contacting the UUA Board. We've forwarded your message along
> to the appropriate members of the UUA staff.
>
> In Faith,
> Paul Rickter, UUA Secretary
>
> At 08:39 PM 1/18/2007 -0500, you wrote:
> >Thorsday January 18, 2007
> >
> >Dear UUA Trustees,
> >I notice that "Restorative Justice" is one of the items on the agenda of
> >the January 2007 UUA Board of Trustees meetings. I have been seeking some
> >genuine restorative justice for myself and other victims of abusive clergy
> >misconduct by UU ministers for some time now but to no avail whatsoever.
> >The UUA, its Ministerial Fellowship Committee, and more recently its
> >department Congregational Services, have consistently and quite
> >obstinately refused to provide the slightest restorative justice in
> >response to my serious grievances that arise out of deeply insulting,
> >defamatory, and verbally and psychologically abusive attacks on me by UU
> >ministers. I might add that the two UU ministers whose unbecoming conduct
> >I have complained about have subjected other people to deeply insulting
> >and/or defamatory attacks. The responses of the UUA's Ministerial
> >Fellowship Committee and department Congregational Services to my serious
> >grievances about unbecoming conduct by intolerant and abusive UU clergy
> >have not only been clearly negligent, they have effectively condoned, and
> >thus have been complicit in, the verbally and psychologically abusive
> >clergy misconduct that I have brought to their attention. In fact one of
> >the reasons that I have never received any "restorative justice" from the
> >UUA is because the UUA has quite consciencelessly refused to even
> >acknowledge that I have suffered from any injustice.
> >Anyone who bothers to responsibly investigate my grievances against Rev.
> >Ray Drennan, formerly of the Unitarian Church of Montreal, can readily see
> >that I was subjected to demeaning and abusive insulting and defamatory
> >attacks on my monotheistic religious beliefs and practices by an
> >intolerant atheist "Humanist" UU minister. If you are not already familiar
> >with my case Rev. Ray Drennan mocked and ridiculed my religious beliefs by
> >labeling them as "silliness and fantasy", contemptuously dismissed the
> >profound revelatory religious experience that I was trying to explain to
> >him as "your psychotic experience", and falsely and maliciously labeled an
> >inter-religious celebration of Creation that I had successfully organized
> >as "your cult." For more details I suggest running appropriate Google
> >searches. According to the Executive of the UUA's Ministerial Fellowship
> >Committee, under the directorship of Rev. Diane Miller, this obvious and
> >egregious example of an atheist "Humanist" UU minister's anti-religious
> >intolerance and bigotry "seemed to us to be within the appropriate
> >guidelines of ministerial leadership." To date the UUA, and its obviously
> >negligent and effectively complicit Ministerial Fellowship Committee, have
> >never backed away from this obviously untenable position and have refused
> >to reopen and re-examine my clergy misconduct complaint against Rev. Ray
> >Drennan.
> >More recently I discovered that "Christian" UU minister Rev. Victoria
> >Weinstein had attacked me on her pseudonymous Peacebang blog. In light of
> >her continued offensive and remarkably hypocritical attacks on other
> >people, and even other religious groups, on her Peacebang blog; attacks
> >that the vast majority of people of intelligence and conscience would
> >consider to be most unbecoming of a minister, I decided to file an
> >unbecoming conduct complaint against Rev. Weinstein in order to to
> >determine if there has been any improvement in the UUA's handling of
> >clergy misconduct complaints. The email exchanges between me and the
> >director of Congregational Services Rev. Dr. Tracey Robinson-Harris, and
> >the new Executive Secretary of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee Rev.
> >Beth Miller will show that the UUA is still responding to complaints about
> >unbecoming conduct by its ministers in a manner that is not only quite
> >negligent but which effectively condones their unbecoming conduct. I have
> >posted these recent email exchanges to The Emerson Avenger blog so that
> >UUs, and indeed non-UUs. . . can make up their own minds about how the UUA
> >responds to verbally and psychologically abusive unbecoming conduct by UU
> >ministers. I am very confident that most non-UUs will agree that the UUA's
> >response is both negligent, and effectively complicit in, unbecoming
> >conduct by UU clergy.
> >You may read the email exchanges on these threads and I would urge you to
> >do so -
> >http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-rev-dr-tracey-robinson-harris.html
> >http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com/2007/01/rev-beth-miller-executive-secretary-of.html
> >You may also wish to read this thread which represents public response to
> >those email exchanges -
> >http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com/2007/01/example-of-moral-support-for-emerson.html
> >The fact of the matter is that The Emerson Avenger blog probably would not
> >even exist if the UUA and its Ministerial Fellowship Committee had
> >responded in a responsible manner to my initial complaints against Rev.
> >Ray Drennan, or had conceded to my subsequent demands that my original
> >complaint be re-opened and re-examined in 2002. The Emerson Avenger blog
> >exists precisely because U*Us have consistently, and quite obstinately,
> >refused to provide anything even remotely resembling genuine justice,
> >equity, and compassion in response to my legitimate and quite serious
> >grievances arising from intolerant and abusive clergy misconduct by UU
> >clergy. The two UU ministers who I filed clergy misconduct complaints
> >against are clearly guilty of conduct unbecoming a minister not only in
> >terms of how they have behaved towards me, but in well documented
> >intolerant and abusive or insulting and defamatory attacks on other people
> >or groups.
> >I recently invited UUA President William G. Sinkford to start practicing
> >what he preaches by engaging in what he and other UUs call "waging peace"
> >with me, and other victims of clergy misconduct of various kinds, by
> >waging some genuine restorative justice for all victims of all forms of
> >clergy misconduct by UU ministers, not just clergy sexual misconduct.
> >Sincerely,
> >Robin Edgar
My Boston TEA Party targeted the Arlington Street Church primarily because it is a prominent downtown Boston Unitarian*Universalist Church with some rather questionable history, but AFA*I*AC the more than two year old email string reproduced below is as good a reason as any for The Emerson Avenger to protest in front of the Arlington Street Church with picket signs saying -
UNSAFE SECT?
and
UNITARIANS AFFIRM & PROMOTE ABUSIVE CLERGY
No U*Us?
Re: Restorative Justice For UU Clergy Misconduct Victims
Saturday, February 3, 2007 5:18 PM
From: "Paul Rickter"
To: "Robin Edgar"
Cc: "Bill Sinkford"
Dear Mr. Edgar,
The UUA Board of Trustees is not an appellate body. The Board sets up systems that handle matters like yours and that system has rendered its decision on your complaints. Any further communication will again be forwarded to the UUA staff for its review.
In Faith,
Paul Rickter, UUA Secretary
At 04:29 PM 1/31/2007 -0500, Robin Edgar wrote:
> Dear Mr. Rickter,
>
> I somehow failed to notice your response to my recent email to the UUA's Board of Trustees until now. I am not quite sure how I managed to overlook it but I somehow failed to see it in my inbox until clearing out unwanted emails today. I am responding to you now and I will be sending this response to every member of the UUA's Board of Trustees to ensure that they are all aware of my response.
>
> My email was addressed to the UUA Board of Trustees precisely because I have virtually no confidence in the "appropriate members of the UUA staff" who are supposed to responsibly handle clergy misconduct complaints. This should have been abundantly clear from the content of my email of January 18th, 2007. The whole point of that email which was addressed to all the members of the UUA Trustees, and a few top level UUA officials such as President Bill Sinkford, was to call upon the Board of Trustees to responsibly intervene in the serious matters that I brought to the attention of all UUA Trustees in that email. I am thus not sure how forwarding my email to "appropriate members of the UUA staff" will accomplish anything productive.
>
> I have heard absolutely nothing from any UUA staff since I sent my email to the UUA Board of Trustees and, quite frankly, I do not realistically expect to hear from any "appropriate members of the UUA staff" as a result of your forwarding of my email to them. I will none-the-less ask you to identify exactly which "appropriate members of the UUA staff" you forwarded my email to so I may know who the UUA Board of Trustees consider to be responsible in this matter. Please forgive me for saying so but I believe that the UUA Board of Trustees is simply passing the buck back to UUA staff members who have clearly proven themselves to be quite disinterested in providing any genuine restorative justice rather than doing what is necessary to begin living up to UUA President Bill Sinkford's Holiday Message calling upon UUs to rededicate themselves to what he terms "waging peace" within the UU world. I am seeking responsible intervention and appropriate action on the part of the members of the UUA Board of Trustees with respect to the matters that I brought to the attention of Trustees in my email of January 18th. The "appropriate members of the UUA staff" are aware of my clergy misconduct complaints and have quite evidently failed, indeed thay have effectively refused, to provide any genuine restorative justice as per clearly stated UUA clergy misconduct policies.
>
> The fact of the matter is that I am by no means the only victim of clergy misconduct who has been very poorly served by "appropriate members of the UUA staff". Other victims of clergy misconduct, including victims of clergy sexual misconduct, have yet to be provided with the "restorative justice" that the UUA promised to provide to victims of clergy misconduct several years ago now. I had meant to bring the UUA Trustees attention to a new blog that deals with the UUA's failure to provide genine restorative justice to victims of clergy sexual misconduct in my email but forgot to do so. I am doing so now.
>
> The title of the blog is - Speaking Truth To Power
>
> How Unitarian Universalists address clergy misconduct
>
> although it might be more appropriately be sub-titled -
>
> How Unitarian Universalists fail to address clergy misconduct
>
> The URL of the blog is -
>
> The blog is written by a female victim of clergy sexual misconduct who is well acquainted with UUA policies and procedures and has actively participated in UUA programs intended to revise and improve those policies and procedures. This woman knows very well from considerable personal experience of the "system" that the UUA continues to fail to live up to the solemn promises about "restorative justice" that it made to victims of clergy sexual misconduct several years ago now. Her 'Speaking Truth To Power' blog would not even exist if she believed that the UUA was living up to its clearly stated policies and promises. Besides the fact that there continue to be serious problems with the existing UUA procedures for dealing with clergy misconduct of all kinds, the fact of the matter is that the "appropriate members of the UUA staff" have clearly failed, and have even outright refused, to responsibly implement those existing procedures that could lead to what the UUA terms "restorative justice".
>
> Simply put the "appropriate members of the UUA staff" have failed to live up to the solemn promises aka "covenants" that the UUA has made about providing restorative justice to victims of clergy misconduct. I have yet to receive anything even remotely resembling restorative justice for the verbally and psychologically abusive clergy misconduct that I have complained about to "appropriate members of the UUA staff" in the past and I have very good reason to believe that other victims of clergy misconduct, including victims of clergy sexual misconduct, have been poorly served by the UUA. I expect the UUA Board of Trustees to responsibly act upon the serious concerns that I have shared with UUA Trustees in my email of January 18th, 2007 to say nothing of the contents of an earlier email that I sent to the Board of Trustees a few years ago now.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Robin Edgar
>
>
> Paul Rickter
> Robin,
>
> Thank you for contacting the UUA Board. We've forwarded your message along
> to the appropriate members of the UUA staff.
>
> In Faith,
> Paul Rickter, UUA Secretary
>
> At 08:39 PM 1/18/2007 -0500, you wrote:
> >Thorsday January 18, 2007
> >
> >Dear UUA Trustees,
> >I notice that "Restorative Justice" is one of the items on the agenda of
> >the January 2007 UUA Board of Trustees meetings. I have been seeking some
> >genuine restorative justice for myself and other victims of abusive clergy
> >misconduct by UU ministers for some time now but to no avail whatsoever.
> >The UUA, its Ministerial Fellowship Committee, and more recently its
> >department Congregational Services, have consistently and quite
> >obstinately refused to provide the slightest restorative justice in
> >response to my serious grievances that arise out of deeply insulting,
> >defamatory, and verbally and psychologically abusive attacks on me by UU
> >ministers. I might add that the two UU ministers whose unbecoming conduct
> >I have complained about have subjected other people to deeply insulting
> >and/or defamatory attacks. The responses of the UUA's Ministerial
> >Fellowship Committee and department Congregational Services to my serious
> >grievances about unbecoming conduct by intolerant and abusive UU clergy
> >have not only been clearly negligent, they have effectively condoned, and
> >thus have been complicit in, the verbally and psychologically abusive
> >clergy misconduct that I have brought to their attention. In fact one of
> >the reasons that I have never received any "restorative justice" from the
> >UUA is because the UUA has quite consciencelessly refused to even
> >acknowledge that I have suffered from any injustice.
> >Anyone who bothers to responsibly investigate my grievances against Rev.
> >Ray Drennan, formerly of the Unitarian Church of Montreal, can readily see
> >that I was subjected to demeaning and abusive insulting and defamatory
> >attacks on my monotheistic religious beliefs and practices by an
> >intolerant atheist "Humanist" UU minister. If you are not already familiar
> >with my case Rev. Ray Drennan mocked and ridiculed my religious beliefs by
> >labeling them as "silliness and fantasy", contemptuously dismissed the
> >profound revelatory religious experience that I was trying to explain to
> >him as "your psychotic experience", and falsely and maliciously labeled an
> >inter-religious celebration of Creation that I had successfully organized
> >as "your cult." For more details I suggest running appropriate Google
> >searches. According to the Executive of the UUA's Ministerial Fellowship
> >Committee, under the directorship of Rev. Diane Miller, this obvious and
> >egregious example of an atheist "Humanist" UU minister's anti-religious
> >intolerance and bigotry "seemed to us to be within the appropriate
> >guidelines of ministerial leadership." To date the UUA, and its obviously
> >negligent and effectively complicit Ministerial Fellowship Committee, have
> >never backed away from this obviously untenable position and have refused
> >to reopen and re-examine my clergy misconduct complaint against Rev. Ray
> >Drennan.
> >More recently I discovered that "Christian" UU minister Rev. Victoria
> >Weinstein had attacked me on her pseudonymous Peacebang blog. In light of
> >her continued offensive and remarkably hypocritical attacks on other
> >people, and even other religious groups, on her Peacebang blog; attacks
> >that the vast majority of people of intelligence and conscience would
> >consider to be most unbecoming of a minister, I decided to file an
> >unbecoming conduct complaint against Rev. Weinstein in order to to
> >determine if there has been any improvement in the UUA's handling of
> >clergy misconduct complaints. The email exchanges between me and the
> >director of Congregational Services Rev. Dr. Tracey Robinson-Harris, and
> >the new Executive Secretary of the Ministerial Fellowship Committee Rev.
> >Beth Miller will show that the UUA is still responding to complaints about
> >unbecoming conduct by its ministers in a manner that is not only quite
> >negligent but which effectively condones their unbecoming conduct. I have
> >posted these recent email exchanges to The Emerson Avenger blog so that
> >UUs, and indeed non-UUs. . . can make up their own minds about how the UUA
> >responds to verbally and psychologically abusive unbecoming conduct by UU
> >ministers. I am very confident that most non-UUs will agree that the UUA's
> >response is both negligent, and effectively complicit in, unbecoming
> >conduct by UU clergy.
> >You may read the email exchanges on these threads and I would urge you to
> >do so -
> >http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-rev-dr-tracey-robinson-harris.html
> >http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com/2007/01/rev-beth-miller-executive-secretary-of.html
> >You may also wish to read this thread which represents public response to
> >those email exchanges -
> >http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com/2007/01/example-of-moral-support-for-emerson.html
> >The fact of the matter is that The Emerson Avenger blog probably would not
> >even exist if the UUA and its Ministerial Fellowship Committee had
> >responded in a responsible manner to my initial complaints against Rev.
> >Ray Drennan, or had conceded to my subsequent demands that my original
> >complaint be re-opened and re-examined in 2002. The Emerson Avenger blog
> >exists precisely because U*Us have consistently, and quite obstinately,
> >refused to provide anything even remotely resembling genuine justice,
> >equity, and compassion in response to my legitimate and quite serious
> >grievances arising from intolerant and abusive clergy misconduct by UU
> >clergy. The two UU ministers who I filed clergy misconduct complaints
> >against are clearly guilty of conduct unbecoming a minister not only in
> >terms of how they have behaved towards me, but in well documented
> >intolerant and abusive or insulting and defamatory attacks on other people
> >or groups.
> >I recently invited UUA President William G. Sinkford to start practicing
> >what he preaches by engaging in what he and other UUs call "waging peace"
> >with me, and other victims of clergy misconduct of various kinds, by
> >waging some genuine restorative justice for all victims of all forms of
> >clergy misconduct by UU ministers, not just clergy sexual misconduct.
> >Sincerely,
> >Robin Edgar
Comments