"Human Rights Heroes"

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Written by Rev. John Gibbons

“Human Rights Heroes”

A Sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, December 4, 2011

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

The Apology of Samuel Sewall by re-enactor Ron Green)

On this 15^th day of January 1697, I Samuel Sewall Judge at the Court of Salem in the matter of the Witchcraft Trials of 1692, do now make my confession, to the people of this congregation.

I, Samuel Sewall sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon myself and my family, do confess to the Guilt I have contracted for the decisions, to hang my neighbors for witchcraft, that I made at the Commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem. I am upon many accounts more responsible than any other that I know of, and because of this affliction of Guilt, Desire to take the Blame and Shame for what I did. I ask the pardon of men. And I especially desire your prayers that God, who has an unlimited Authority, would pardon my Sin and all other Sins. The decisions I have made and the results of those decisions weigh on my conscience. I ask that God according to his infinitely Benign nature and sovereign power over all things, Not visit my sins upon myself, or any of mine and not cause a plight upon the land. But that God would powerfully defend me against all Temptations to Sin, in the future, and vouchsafe me the Saving Conduct of my Word and Spirit.

I do solemnly swear to a day of penance each and every year that I shall live. I pray that the generations to follow will observe this day also, that the spirits the slain innocent shall be at rest, and that with this day of remembrance, never again will such a crime be perpetrated on humanity.

Sermon

In his introduction to his book The Future of Human Rights, our community minister Bill Schulz (formerly executive director of Amnesty International and now President of the UU Service Committee) cites the apology of Judge Samuel Sewall, he who presided at the Salem trials that led to the execution of 19 women, as a refreshing counter example to so many of the discouraging aspects of American history that too often show our tendency to impose our will on different and less powerful peoples. While his apology did not return life to those he wronged it was nonetheless a rare act of contrition and, Schulz says, Sewall represents another aspect of American tradition, “a tradition of generosity and hospitality; of rescue and liberation; of decency and virtue.”

Massachusetts enacted a day of fasting as repentance for the evils of the witch trials, and Sewall himself would continue to fast one day out of the year for the rest of his life as a sign of contrition.

Sewall’s apology, in fact, was motivated less by his concern for the human rights of witches (whom he continued to regard as criminals) but rather by his sense that abuses of the trial system had so offended God that God had visited many punishments – illnesses, deaths and misfortunes – upon Sewall’s own family. Nonetheless, Sewall imagined that there was a better way and, unlike his contemporaries, his apology reflected a moral conscience.

In addition to Sewall, Bill cites William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child’s demands for an end to slavery; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s outrage when the World Anti-Slavery Society denied delegate-status to women; and Lincoln offering his adversaries “malice toward none and charity for all.” He further includes our defeat of fascism; Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms; Truman’s support for the United Nations; Eisenhower’s conviction that “the only answer to a regime that wages total war is to wage total peace;” and, of course, the every-broadening civil rights movement. Schulz says, “America’s commitment to universal human rights should be presented as reflecting, indeed embodying, the best of the American tradition.”

There has been a clear evolution of human rights over the centuries. Developments in Scotland, England and France in the 17^th and 18^th centuries led the way, contributing to the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 which encoded into law a number of fundamental civil rights and civil freedoms.

And then in our Declaration of Independence in 1776 it was asserted, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”…an affirmation sufficiently bold that its meaning has been ever expanding to include a multitude of diversities never imagined by the framers.

The anti-slavery and women’s rights movements further enlarged concepts of human rights, as did efforts to form the League of Nations after the First World War. Unions added economic rights in the 20^th century. And the great watershed event was Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted in 1948 at the conclusion of WW II the anniversary of which we celebrate this week – next Saturday, December 10, International Human Rights Day.

We post the UDHR on that back wall and we’ve got copies small enough to stuff in your purse or pocket. The UDHR remains a radical document and it is the essential inspiration for our UU Service Committee.

The UDHR is radical because it not merely asserts the right to life, liberty and security, decries slavery and torture, and affirms political rights and freedom of travel and property ownership; but it also enumerates social rights: among others a right to rest and leisure, a right to food, clothing housing and medical care, the right to education, to participation in the cultural life of the community.

These are radical and controversial assertions still today as many, even in our country, trumpet political rights but are skeptical of social rights. But think about it, what good is the right, say, to vote if one is starving, ill, uneducated or illiterate? If one does not have access to housing, health care, or education, of what use is freedom of the press? “Freedom of the press,” as A.J. Liebling famously said, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

However we fall short of the ideals of the UDHR, I think it is important for us to celebrate the progress of human rights. Especially today, when it is tempting to ask “Where are we going, and what are we doing in this handbasket?” there remains great evidence that the progress of humankind may not be onward and upward forever but there is progress!

A study of Native American skeletons from hunter gatherer societies found that 13% died of trauma. In the 17^th century, the Thirty Years War reduced the German population by one-third. Since the 14^th century, the murder rate in Britain has fallen by more than 90%.

For centuries, violence was the accepted backdrop to everyday life. “One game is feudal Europe involved men competing to headbutt to death a cat that had been nailed alive to a post. One reason this was considered so entertaining was the possibility that the cat would claw out someone’s eye.”

There is a Chinese ideograph of a knife next to a nose: pronounced “yi,” it means cutting off one’s nose as punishment. Chinese students, we rejoice, no longer learn that character.

The Bible condoned genocide: (“thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth,” saith Deuteronomy 20:16). And Theodore Roosevelt, once a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”

Nicholas Kristof who recently cited these examples suggested that there is a “growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes (increasingly, the hooves) of others. …The world still faces brutality, but let’s pause…to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth.”

So that’s the background about this week’s observance of Human Rights Day, but I want to spend the remainder of my time introducing you to the Human Rights Heroes on the cover of your order of service.

There’s background to my decision to preach about this. In September of 1977 - 34 years ago - I sat in the pews of the Arlington Street Church in Boston and, in their version of joys and concerns, the beloved distinguished UU theologian James Luther Adams rose from his pew and announced the death in prison, at the hands of his jailers, of South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko.

The memory of JLA’s concern has stayed in my mind ever since, as much or more than any candle-lighting.

That was the first time, I think, that I’d ever heard the name Steve Biko and yet it was Biko’s activism and his martyrdom that laid the groundwork for the success of the African National Congress, the release of Nelson Mandela, and freedom in South Africa.

Hearing Biko’s name that day in church burnished my conviction that Unitarian Universalist churches ought to be places where we hear heroic names, perhaps for the first time; that here we should be exposed to ideas and people that are changing the world to make it a better place.

Friends, we’re not here just to accept one another as we are; we’re here not just to build a beloved community – and certainly not just a beloved community within these cozy walls. We are here as well to learn some new things, hear unfamiliar ideas and names, and to be inspired by their example to live lives worthy of the promise of our humanity.

So here’s what I’ve done. Over the last few weeks, I’ve asked a number of people to tell me the names of their human rights heroes, names we may but likely may not know. Jim Adams is no longer around, and so I asked Bill Schulz. I asked UU theologian Thandeka who twice here has been our Spirit of Democracy preacher. I asked Dan McKanan, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Senior UUA lecturer in Divinity at Harvard Divinity School who has also previously preached here but who has also agreed to be this year’s Spirit of Democracy preacher. And I asked program directors at the UUSC, Atema Eclai and Martha Thompson – world-class authorities on human rights.

Here are thumbnail sketches of their nominees, listed and pictured on your order of service.

Last week, by the way, we were visited by one of Joe’s classes from Andover Newton and, among their theological and ecclesiological questions, one student asked why we have tissue boxes in our pews. I said that sometimes we cry and, well, sometimes we also need to blow our noses. Well, in the pews are also pencils and, yes, you can use them to fill out our connection cards but you can always take notes too. If you ever hear any of these names again, and I am certain that you will, I want you to know who they are. Class, take out your pencils.

Bill Schulz nominated four of the 10: Baltasar Garzon, Hina Jilani, Natasa Kandic, Ka Hsaw wa.

Baltasar Garzon is a Spanish judge who takes on powerful enemies: government corruption, organized crime, terrorists and state antiterrorism units, drug lords. It was Garzon who made history by indicting former Chilean dictator Pinochet when he was in Europe, thus establishing the precedent that heads of state may be tried for crimes such as torture and genocide, that no one is above the law. Dictators around the world have canceled their trips because when a government persecutes its own people, that betrayal is of universal concern.

Hina Jilani (and her sister Asma Jahangir) are at the forefront of Pakistan’s women’s and human rights movements. Both have been subject to 24-hour a day surveillance by the state for the last 20 years. They help women obtain divorces from abusive husbands; they founded Pakistan’s first all-women’s law firm and Jilani is the chair of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission which they founded. At great peril to their lives, they have called for the abolition of repressive sharia laws that deny the rights of women.

Natasha Kandic is a Serb who led the charge in filing criminal complaints against alleged war criminals committed by her own and by other ethnic groups. She has brought long-buried evidence out of the shadows of history and into the spotlight of the courtrooms in order to help the Balkans confront its past. A testimonial to her says, “Physical bravery is rare on the battlefield; rarer still is the bravery it takes to stand up against one’s own government, or against one’s own community, including family, friends, and professional colleagues, all in the pursuit of justice.”

Ka Hsaw Wa is the founder of EarthRights International that filed precedent-setting lawsuits against a US corporation, the oil company Unocal, for torture, rape, extortion, slavery and murders committed by its corporate agents overseas. He has spent years walking through the forests of Burma, interviewing witnesses and recording testimonies of victims of human rights abuses. Tortured by the Burmese military, to protect his own family, he took on a new name, Ka Hsaw Wa, meaning “white elephant.”

He has said, “I don’t know if courage comes from power or from pain. I remember a time that I listened to someone’s testimony and my whole body began to shake. It was the most horrible thing I had ever heard. The wife of a revolutionary had been arrested in an attempt to get to her husband. The soldiers killed their baby and burned it, then forced the mother to eat it because the father didn’t come back. Tales like this repulse me and simultaneously give me courage. The suffering that I have endured is nothing compared to theirs. These peoples needs are greater than my own.”

UU theologian Thandeka nominated Barbara Jordan. Jordan, who died in 1996 was an American politician who was both a product and a leader of the Civil Rights movement, the first African American elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction, the first southern black female elected to the United States House of Representatives. The main terminal of the Austin Airport is named for her. Though unpublicized in her lifetime, Jordan is increasingly known as a hero to gay and lesbian people of color.

Harvard professor Dan McKanan gave me three nominees: Abby Kelly, Norman Thomas and the Movement of Landless Workers.

These are Dan’s testimonials:

“Abby Kelley wasn’t the first female abolitionist to break the taboo on women’s speaking in public, but she was the most persistent. She traveled throughout the Northeast and Midwest, braving the taunts of those who considered her a harlot, and challenging her fellow European Americans to repudiate all cooperation with slavery. Often, she worked as a lecturing team with Stephen Foster (her future husband) and Frederick Douglass, modeling alliances across race and gender. After the civil war, when some white feminists distanced themselves from anti-racist work, she continued to foster alliances and the broadest possible vision of human rights.”

“Norman Thomas was one of a small cluster of Protestant ministers who risked their careers by speaking out against World War I. His criticism of the war led him to socialism, and for several decades he was the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Thomas exemplified the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning”: over the course of his career, he lost his faith in Christianity, but kept faith with the broader spiritual idealism of socialism; he lost his faith in absolute pacifism, but continued to work against unjust wars and indiscriminate weaponry. My sense (Dan says) is that Thomas was a major influence on the generation who built up the fellowship movement in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, but is virtually unknown to later generations of UUs.”

(I must note here that Thomas was born in Marion, Ohio – childhood home as well to lackluster president Warren G. Harding... and to my wife. When we visit Marion, I’ve made it a tradition to go to the black-topped parking lot where there is a lonely historical sign marking the site of Thomas’ birthplace, now torn down. I tie flowers to this post and leave appreciative notes. It passes the time.

Dan’s third nominee is the Movement of Landless Workers (MST) in Brazil, “one of the most exciting human rights organizations at work today--exciting to me (Dan says), in part, because they are not oriented to a single charismatic leader. For twenty-five years, they have worked to resettle landless persons on unused agricultural land, using a provision in the Brazilian constitution that prevents land speculators from monopolizing farm land. They are part of a global movement for “food sovereignty” – ensuring that local communities can shape their own food systems, in harmony with both nature and human community. (See http://www.mstbrazil.org/content/mst-receives-2011-food-sovereignty-prize)

Finally, I received responses from two of the extraordinary program directors at UUSC, Atema Eclai and Martha Thompson. Martha wrote to me,

“One name I would give is our partner Dalia Ziada, a young women in Egypt who is now a leading activist who is a poet, blogger, organizer, and human rights worker. We are very proud to be her partner.” It was Dlia whom Lisa referenced in her story today because Dalia translated into Arabic a comic book about the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, the Montgomery bus boycott, and nonviolence. The comic has been immensely popular in Egypt.

Martha also named Rev. Tyrone Edwards from Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana.

Edwards, whom I have met, established The Zion Travelers Cooperative Center as a relief hub for his community of 600 families in Phoenix, Louisiana.

His own house destroyed by the hurricane, where it stood he built a structure of blue tarps that hang over a plywood frame, making a structure that became the community’s only working shower.

Edwards established a cooperative center with rebuilding supplies. An orange shipping container houses a lending library of saws, generators, rakes, lawn mowers, and hammers. The center also gives residents lumber accounts of $500 to $1,000 to rebuild. Armed with hope and building supplies, residents have begun to return to Phoenix.

(I was given other names whose pictures and names are not on your order of service: Wanti Muldar, a young human rights activist from Aceh in Indonesia who heads up Bungeong Jeumpa, a group working on women’s legal rights to land with whom UUSC worked after the tsunami.

Another is Henri Tripanghe from People’s Watch, a group UUSC supported in India after the Tsunami who do excellent human rights work.

And also Jaime Prieto Mendez one of the leading figures in the Colombian human rights movement.)

I want First Parish to be a place of learning, spiritual discernment and practical mobilization where the outside world is brought into our awareness, and where we are inspired to go out into the world with a message of human liberation.

Last April I gave the invocation at Bedford’s commemoration of the beginning of the American Revolution. I said that ours was a messy, contentious, ragtag revolution, the outcome of which was far from certain; and in this it resembled the messy, ragtag, contentious uncertain uprisings of today’s Arab Spring.

As Americans had faith in the future, so too do those who work for human rights today. And, well, I concluded my invocation by shouting Allahu Akbar!, God is great. Probably I was just trying to stir things up…and some thought that, surrounded as I was by hundreds of ragtag but nonetheless armed Minuteman, I was lucky not to have been shot on the spot! But a few minutes later I was approached by a young Syrian man and his family, tears in their eyes, saying thank you for acknowledging their aspirations. Who knew there were Syrians in our midst but, of course, there are. Someday they hope to be free, just as someday we hope to live up to our espoused endowment of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

It is important that we hear the names of human rights heroes and acknowledge our universal aspirations to affirm the human rights of all peoples.

As enumerated in the UDHR:

…that we are all free and equal

…for an end to discrimination

…the right to life, liberty & security for all

…abolish slavery

…abolish torture

…that everyone is protected by the law

…that we are all equal before the law

…access to justice for all

…an end to arbitrary detention

…that everybody has the right to a fair trial

…we are all innocent until proven guilty

…we all have a right to privacy

…we are all free to live in and return to our home countries

…everybody has access to refuge in a safe country

…everyone has a right to a nationality

…the right to marriage and family for all

…everyone has the right to own property

…freedom of thought, conscience and belief for all

…the right to freedom of expression and opinion for all

…to peaceful assembly

…that everyone has a right to participate in government

…the right to universal social security

…equal pay for equal work for all

…the right to rest and leisure for all

…food, shelter and health care for all

…the right to an education for all

…the right to the arts, culture, and science

…for a fair and free world

…to develop as a person through work in the community

…that no one can take away our rights

Inspired by those who, like Samuel Sewall, have had a change of heart and by those who have stayed true to their highest ideals, we know… “The world still faces brutality, but we pause…to acknowledge remarkable progress and give thanks for the human capacity for compassion and moral growth.”

Closing Words

"I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won.”

--Norman Thomas

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