The UUA Board Of Trustees Has Voted To Offer A New UUA Formal Apology To Victims Of Clergy And Professional Misconduct During The 2014 UUA General Assembly

But don't take my word for it U*Us, take the word of UU World magazine senior editor Elaine McArdle, as committed to writing in her UU World magazine report titled -

Board wants new process for handling complaints about clergy misconduct

"And the board voted to offer a formal apology to victims and survivors of clergy and professional misconduct at this year’s General Assembly, which will be held June 25–29 in Providence, R.I. It charged the working group and Lammert to craft the apology and to create a report to be presented at GA"

On the surface this is very positive news. In fact, in a telephone conversation with Rev. Gail Seavey of UU Safety in the wake of my September 2013 phone conversation with new UUA Moderator Jim Key, I told Rev. Seavey that I was pushing for the UUA delivering a new formal apology to victims of UU clergy misconduct during the 2014 UUA GA in Providence. Rev. Seavey responded in a manner that suggested that, as much as she would very much like to see a new UUA apology delivered to clergy misconduct victims during the 2014 UUA GA, she did not expect it to happen so soon. It seems that my repeated demands for a second UUA apology to UU clergy misconduct victims, that I have been reiterating for some years now. . . are finally bearing fruit. Elaine McArdle's report explicitly states that:

"Although the UUA, through then–Executive Vice President Kay Montgomery, made a formal apology to victims and survivors at the 2000 General Assembly, Leiserson says that in the 14 years since, the pledge to remedy failures was never fulfilled."

This is something that I have been saying for years now. Although the UUA's formal apology to victims of UU clergy sexual misconduct delivered by former UUA Executive Vice President Kathleen 'Kay Montgomery during the year 2000 UUA GA in Nashville Tennessee appears on the surface to be a sincere and quite comprehensive formal apology, it has ultimately been betrayed and even proven to be effectively fraudulent in that the UUA in general, and 'Kay Montgomery in particular. . . not only failed to "bend toward justice", as the UUA made a formal "pledge" to do in this official apology, but they continued to bend justice aka pervert justice in order to protect abusive UU clergy from facing any real accountability for their clergy misconduct. There can be few better examples of the UUA's shameful proclivity to bend justice aka pervert justice than the Rev. Peter Morales administration's bat shit crazy, utterly shameful, and ultimately futile attempt to misuse Canada's archaic blasphemy law to conceal "such despicable crimes as pedophilia and rape" from the public by falsely accusing Yours Truly of the crime of blasphemous libel in a hubristic and deeply misguided effort to intimidate me into removing some The Emerson Avenger blog posts about certain UUs who have actually been convicted of engaging in "such despicable crimes as pedophilia and rape". Indeed UUA Executive Vice President Kay Montgomery herself was almost certainly the driving force behind the Morales administration's shameful Lance Armstrong style legal bullying that quite evidently sought to conceal the fact that "certain Unitarian Universalist ministers" (to say nothing of certain UUA Religious Educators...) have not only engaged in "such despicable crimes as pedophilia and rape", but have actually been convicted of committing "such despicable crimes as pedophilia and rape" in criminal trials and have subsequently been incarcerated for such "despicable crimes".

This UU World magazine report informs us that Rev. Debra W. Haffner, president of the Religious Institute, also addressed the UUA Board of Trustees for an hour about the findings of her 2010 report, 'Toward a Sexually Healthy and Responsible Unitarian Universalist Association' and that she is preparing a final report for this fall. Rev. Haffner recommended a new UUA apology should be delivered to victims of UU clergy sexual misconduct in that 2010 report if I am not mistaken, so it is not at all surprising that she is quoted as saying that the UUA's decision to finally deliver a second formal apology to clergy misconduct victims is “well overdue.”

More about this development later. . .