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UUA Moderator Gini Courter Gets A Blast From Her Negligent & Complicit & Hypocritical Past. . .

Dear Gini,

The email copied below was sent to you and all UUA Trustees almost four years ago now.

To the very best of my knowledge neither you, the UUA Board of Trustees, nor the UUA more generally, has ever responded to that email in a manner that genuinely honors and upholds UU principles, especially those principles which affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person and call for justice, equity and compassion in human relations. As I recall this email complaining about the highly questionable (mis)handling of my clergy misconduct complaint against Rev. Victoria Weinstein by Rev. Dr. Tracey Robinson-Harris and Rev. Beth Miller was simply referred back to the very UUA administrators whose negligence and incompetence, and effective complicity in Rev. Weinstein's insulting and abusive unbecoming conduct, I was complaining about to the Board.  

I suggest that you (re)read this email and make an effort to respond to the concerns that it raises in a genuinely responsible manner. Ignoring this email, as you have ignored most if not all of my previous emails, is not acceptable to me and I am very confident that most other people of conscience will not be impressed by your own and UUA Trustees’ negligent responses to my serious grievances. If I do not receive a timely response from you I will have little choice but to conclude that you have chosen to stand on the side of the egregious institutional stonewalling and denial that the UUA has engaged in for well over a decade now, rather than choosing to stand on the side of love for victims of UU clergy misconduct.

I demand a proper response to these legitimate concerns, as well as the concerns that I shared about serious flaws in the MFC Rules and other UUA policies and procedures for dealing with clergy misconduct during the April 2010 UUA Board of Trustees meeting. The concerns that I have shared with you and UUA Trustees in the past are both legitimate and very serious. In fact former UUA President Bill Sinkford once described them as "obviously deep concerns" before negligently failing to ensure that my "deep concerns" were responsibly addressed by the UUA and its all too aptly named Ministerial Fellowship Committee. In light of your complete lack of responsiveness to the follow-up emails that I sent to you after the April 2010 Board meeting it would appear that you and other UUA Trustees have chosen to willfully ignore my "obviously deep concerns" regarding the UUA's mishandling of clergy misconduct, and do little or nothing to responsibly address them.

For the record, believe that the negligent response of the UUA Board Of Trustees to the email copied below makes the UUA Board of Trustees effectively complicit in the UUA's highly questionable decision to allow insulting and abusive U*U ministers to say absolutely anything they want about other people as long as they do so under the cowardly cover of internet anonymity because *that* is the upshot of the following ruling made by former Congregational Services Director Rev. Dr. Tracey Robinson-Harris which was backed to the hilt by former MFC Executive Secretary Rev. Beth Miller, if not other "less than competent" UUA administrators -

It is the case that in this situation the minister’s blog is anonymous ( though you were able to identify the individual) and that she is free to express her opinions and to do so outside of her professional role as a minister serving a congregation.

The above ruling clearly means that any U*U minister, not just Rev. Victoria Weinstein aka Peacebang, can express absolutely any opinion whatsoever, no matter how insulting and offensive or otherwise abusive that opinion may be, as long as they do so under the cowardly cover of anonymity. As far as I am concerned the above ruling flies in the face of the letter and the spirit of several clauses of the UUMA Guidelines, to say nothing of the Seven Principles and other claimed ideals of U*Uism. Yet, to date, the UUA has obstinately refused to responsibly review that highly questionable ruling and over-rule it. In fact, as I reported to the Board during the April 2010 Board of Trustees meeting, when I asked UUA President Peter Morales to ensure that the UUA responsibly reopens and reviews the clergy misconduct complaints that I filed against Rev. Ray Drennan and Rev. Victoria Weinstein, he flatly refused to do so saying -

"We will not reopen something that is years and years and years old."

Do you really believe that U*U ministers can say absolutely anything that they want about other people, even suggesting that a person should be kicked in the teeth or "anally impaled on the Statue of Liberty's torch", as long as they do so anonymously? If you continue to fail or refuse to take steps to overturn this remarkably foolish, and ultimately quite harmful, ruling made by Rev. Dr. Tracey Robinson-Harris and fully supported by Rev. Beth Miller I will have little choice but to believe that UUA Trustees condone such insulting and abusive behavior on the part of U*U clergy. In fact, in light of the negligent response of the UUA Board of Trustees to the email copied below, I consider UUA Trustees to be partially responsible for the libelous Robin Edgar Sucks blog which may well be written by one or more U*U ministers hiding behind the cover of internet anonymity.

See - http://robinedgarsucks.wordpress.com

One thing is certain, Rev. Dr. Tracey Robinson-Harris' ruling quoted above means that if the insulting and defamatory, indeed in parts outright libelous, Robin Edgar Sucks blog is written by one or more "less than perfect" U*U ministers they have no fear of facing any accountability from the UUA and the ever so aptly named Ministerial Fellowship Committee. On the contrary, the UUA and MFC have pretty much expressly told abusive U*U clergy that they can insult and defame people, or otherwise verbally and psychologically abuse people, with complete impunity as long as they do so under the cowardly cover of internet anonymity.

Brilliant. . .

I consider all those UUA Trustees and UUA administrators who received the email copied below to be enablers of verbally and psychologically abusive U*U clergy and the anonymous "collective authorship" of the Robin Edgar Sucks blog, and to be effectively complicit in its deeply insulting and outright defamatory content. Likewise I consider them to be "accessories after the fact" with regard to Rev. Victoria Weinstein's "sodomy fantasy" which luridly, and even sadistically, imagined a Republican U.S. state senator "anally impaled on the Statue of Liberty's torch." If the current UUA Board of Trustees, and the President Peter Morales UUA administration, do not act rapidly to ensure that the UUA responsibly reviews and overturns Rev. Dr. Tracey Robinson-Harris' highly questionable ruling I will consider the UUA Board of Trustees and current UUA administration to be complicit in that dubious ruling and will govern myself accordingly.

As UUA Moderator you would be very well advised to provide an individualized personal response to this email that clearly expresses your own personal position regarding the serious concerns that I have raised herein. If you fail or refuse to provide a personal response to this email I will consider you to be an enabler of abusive U*U clergy and complicit in the U*U injustices, abuses, and hypocrisy that I am complaining about.   

In light of the fact that next Monday is Martin Luther King Day 2011 I will leave you with these words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. –

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Be assured that your obdurate silence, which I consider to be complicit in a variety of U*U injustices and abuses that I have previously brought to your attention, is anything but Golden.

Sincerely,

Robin Edgar 
    
  


--- On Thu, 1/18/07, Robin Edgar  wrote:

From: Robin Edgar
Subject: Restorative Justice For UU Clergy Misconduct Victims
To: prickter@uua.org, ladair@uua.org, cortman@uua.org
Received: Thursday, January 18, 2007, 8:39 PM
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 -



You may also wish to read this thread which represents public response to those email exchanges -


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.


To date I have not received so much as an acknowledgement of receipt of that R.S.V. P. invitation in spite of follow-up requests for a formal response from President Sinkford. President Sinkford has so far been completely silent and apparently very passive in response to my invitation to begin “waging peace” by waging some genuine restorative justice, equity and compassion in human relations with me and other victims of U*U injustices and abuses. It would thus appear that President Bill Sinkford is most regrettably quite intent on declining my invitation to begin waging peace. If I do not receive a positive response to that R.S.V.P. invitation by the end of next week at the very latest I will consider my invitation to begin waging peace with me to have been formally declined by President Sinkford.

That R.S.V.P. invitation is open to all other UUs so I am now inviting UUA Trustees to begin waging peace by taking responsible and effective steps to ensure that some genuine restorative justice is finally provided for me and other victims of UU clergy misconduct, to say nothing of victims of various other internal injustices and abuses. I believe that I have already made my own personal expectations quite clear in previous communications with the UUA so I will not repeat them in detail here. I call upon all UUA Trustees to live up to both the letter and the spirit of President Bill Sinkford's Holiday Message about restoring hope and waging peace by doing the right thing and doing everything in their power to provide genuine restorative justice to me and all other victims of diverse injustices and abuses that have been initially perpetrated by U*U clergy, but have subsequently been aggravated, escalated, and perpetuated by the negligence and institutional stonewalling and denial of the UUA and MFC etc. that condones, and thus is effectively complicit in, unbecoming and abusive clergy misconduct of all kinds.

Sincerely,

Robin Edgar
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