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Women’s Power: the Hope of the World
January 24, 2010
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Many years ago around this time, when I was a minister for the West Los Angeles Fellowship, I gave a sermon celebrating Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, which happened 37 years ago on this past Friday on January 22nd. I noticed at the time that a beloved member was not in the congregation. On the following Sunday, I approached her asking about it and she said with a little bit of anger in her voice, “I did not want to come to hear your sermon because you are not a woman.” Now, I understood partly what she meant. Abortion affects women directly, personally, profoundly.
But I mentioned that there are issues that affect men about which I believed that women have had a right to make known their thoughts and feelings, for example, during the Vietnam War, there was the issue of the draft. But I also said that men need to be circumspect when talking about women’s reproduction rights or on women in general. Thus, when I do this sermon on women, about how I see that their power can help save us and our planet, I speak with humility given that, obviously, I do not have the experience of being a woman, but I also speak with hope and admiration for women such that people will begin to understand that when women have power – political, social and personal power – then there is still hope that our world can become a better place. I have a rule, if you will, or perhaps it is better to call it a test of what makes a nation or society civilized. To the extent that a nation or society treats its women well, is the extent that that nation or society is civilized. Of course, I could include other groups in this test, such as poor people or people of particular ethnic or religious groups or of course, of children. But I believe that if women are treated well, then the members of these other groups will also tend to be treated well. I want to share with you some stories of women who are models for us of how we can live better lives and improve our nation and society. There are so many to draw upon. I had originally intended to share with you some stories about women who have been Unitarians and Universalists, such as Susan B. Anthony, Julia Ward Howe, Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Sophia Fahs, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Olympia Brown, Louisa May Alcott to name a few. Indeed, I printed some hundred pages of stories of these women and I have them right here for those of you who may want to read them. But then it occurred to me that I have a more compelling story to tell about three modern women, a story that is close to home for all of us and needs exploration. It concerns our present economic crisis. I believe these stories are moral fables about the power of women and the power of money that can help guide us out of this crisis.
In my family, the finances are handled by my wife, Julie – thank God. She is quite competent and diligent in handling our money, such that we have always lived within our means comfortably. But even more than that, Julie is quite savvy about economic trends. I don’t know about you, but from my conversations with husbands, I found that the wives generally handled the money for the family. Perhaps, that is because my friends are often other clergy and social justice activists, who really are not that good at handling money. But I also think that women have an advantage that men do not because they generally are in charge of the home, of creating an environment that is conducive to the spiritual and emotional growth of the children and parents, plus any pets that may be floating around. It is interesting to me that the words ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’ have the same prefix, ‘eco’ which is Greek for ‘household’. Thus, ecology is the study of the household, or the home, that is our home, the planet Earth and ‘economy’ refers to household manager. It seems to me that women are especially attuned to the issues of protecting and managing our home. And so, today I want to honor three women who very well may be the persons who can help rescue us from our economic crisis, if people will listen to them. Their ideas were prescient and their solutions, reasonable and perhaps life saving, again, if people will listen to them. I begin with Brooksley Born. Perhaps, you have never heard about her, but she was the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency – the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) – who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped to avert the crisis. A PBS Frontline show of October 19, 2009 called “The Warning” featured Ms. Born in her failed effort to protect the American people from the obscure, risky behavior of trading what are called derivatives. “We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” she said, “[but] they were totally opposed to [making it transparent]. That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?” Michael Kirk, the producer of “The Warning”, explored the story of how Brooksley Born failed to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008. “I didn’t know Brooksley Born,” said former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton’s powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. Levitt said of her, “I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable.” Levitt explained how the other principals of the Working Group – former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin – convinced him that Born’s attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was “clearly a mistake.” The members of the President’s Working Group vehemently opposed regulation – especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born. Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born reported that Larry Summers, former Assistant Treasury Secretary under President Clinton, told her “You’re going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II.” Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. “Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming,” Kirk said. “Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves.” Now, many of the same men who shut down Born are in key positions in the Obama administration. Michael Kirk in “The Warning” revealed the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one. “It’ll happen again if we don’t take the appropriate steps,” Born warned. “There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.” As one who has an odd name myself, B-e-u pronounced “boy”, I wonder what having a name like Brooksley can do to a child? I imagine that it may have helped her to be independent, for if you watch “The warning”, you will discover that she was one of only seven women who attended Stanford Law School in the early 60s. She was the first female student ever to be named president of the Stanford Law Review and is sometimes credited with having been the first woman in American history to hold the editorship of a major law review. She received the “Outstanding Senior” award and graduated at the top of her class in 1964. At any rate, we can see that she, as a woman, stood up to all those men who truly believed that they knew better, perhaps because they were men and she was a woman. Again to rephrase my theme here, to extent that women are treated with respect is the extent that our social, political and economic problems can get solved. And as a side note, it behooves us to pay attention to people with odd names. The second women I want to acknowledge is Sheila Bair who was the Chairwoman of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) appointed in 2006 by President George W. Bush [she is a Republican]. Bair had played a key role in the management of the 2008 financial crisis. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Bair was one of the first government officials to recognize the problem of subprime loans. Bair assumed a prominent role in the Bush administration’s response to the crisis, including successfully pressing for a provision in the federal government’s financial rescue bill that temporarily raised the cap on FDIC insured deposits up to $250,000 per account.
Recently, in an article in the Wall Street Journal by Michael R. Crittenden, she warned that problems in the U.S. commercial real estate market are expected to continue downward in the first quarter. From the article of January 22nd Mr. Crittenden said this: Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said in a speech that regulators expect banks to report higher delinquencies and charge-off rates for commercial real estate properties in the first three months of 2010. “Commercial real estate credit problems are affecting large and small banks alike,” Bair said. She said commercial real estate-market participants need to strengthen the financing system, including changes to the securitization process that result in a return to more prudent underwriting. “Lenders need to embrace the lessons learned from this crisis,” Bair said.Now, I don’t understand all of this financial jargon, but what I do know is that it is important that we listen to Sheila Bair, take her seriously, because I truly believe she knows what she is talking about. Indeed, I trust her more than many of the men charged with taking care of our economy either in the White House or in Congress. Finally, I first heard this third woman’s voice as I was driving across the country a year ago summer. It came from an audio book called All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. It was one of the most sensible books I’ve heard or read, not just on how to handle your money, but on how to handle your life. I have since learned that Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard College where she has devoted much of the past three decades to studying the economics of middle class families. In the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis, she became the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to investigate the U.S. banking bailout (formally known as the Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP). In 2007, she also first developed the idea to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which President Barack Obama has advocated and Congress is now considering. In 2005, she and Dr. David Himmelstein published a study on bankruptcy and medical bills, that showed that half of all families filing for bankruptcy did so in the aftermath of a serious medical problem. The finding was particularly noteworthy because 75% of those who fit that description had medical insurance. In a Huffington Post article called “Elizabeth Warren: Pass A Consumer Protection Agency Or Kill Regulatory Reform” of 22 January 2010, Sam Stein reports that Ms. Warren warns us that if the financial reform bill doesn’t establish an effective and independent consumer protection agency or CFPA, Congress would be better off passing nothing at all. Warren said her chief concern is that financial regulatory reform legislation will suffer the same fate as health care reform – starting out with noble principles but scaled down and negotiated away ultimately to ineffectualness. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency, she said, is not optional. “The CFPA is the heart of what makes regulatory reform work,” Warren said in an interview with the Huffington Post. “The consumer credit market is where the biggest abuses were. It is where families will be most directly affected and it is where the American people will see change. CFPA is how to make clear that regulatory reform is for them, and that it isn’t a game among insiders.” “We just can’t pass a regulatory reform bill that acquiesces to the industry on every front… No one proposal will fix the crisis,” Warren continues. “No one thing caused it and no one thing will fix it. This crisis was brought on by a breakdown at multiple levels... If we have a strong consumer agency, we dial a lot of the risk out of the overall economic system. Too Big To Fail (TBTF) represents the other end of the spectrum of things that need to be repaired. When we get to TBTF, the question is how to pull back the implicit guarantee that we will always rescue these banks.” I have watched Elizabeth Warren on television and have listened to her on the radio giving commentary on the economic crisis. What comes across to me is a woman who is not only knowledgeable, but also sincere, ingenious, someone who probably would have a difficult time telling an untruth unlike politicians and political pundits. Now, there are men who are like that, too, but not usually in positions of power. And yet, we need such people, we need that sensibility, the sensibility of this woman, if we are to solve our difficult problems. Now, these women understood the problems and spoke up courageously to power to try to help solve the problems. We honor women today who speak up courageously. We honor those who refuse to be compliant and nice. The closing hymn We are a Gentle, Angry People was written by Holly Near, a lesbian in response to the 1978 murder of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man on the city council of San Francisco. I like this hymn though I have been troubled with the word “angry”. I once changed it to the word “determined” for a congregation to sing, but alas, it did not work. I realized that angry worked better. Indeed, anger is energy that, if we work on it, can be fashioned into positive action. It is like mothers who can be angry with their children, but they still love them to pieces and would give up their lives to protect them. Hence, mothers are, at times, a gentle, angry people. But their greatest power is their love and compassion. As the Dalai Lama said, “We learn affection from our mother, not a guru. Guru comes later. First we receive the lesson of compassion from our mother by example.” But I say that we can learn that lesson from others, from powerful people who can change our lives, forever.
Gail Geisenhainer spoke of this power in a sermon she gave at the General Assembly in St. Louis in 2006. The sermon was called “We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest”. Now, Gail is a large woman with an infectious smile and an embracing and friendly voice. She told her story about how she became a Unitarian Universalist, of how she was driving a snow plow in Maine and feeling sorry for herself and how a friend invited her to his church. But she rudely refused. “All blank-ing churches are the same,” She informed him, “they say they’re open – but they don’t want queer folk. To Heck with church!” But her friend persisted. And she relented. She describes her first visit this way: …I dressed sooooo, carefully for my first Sunday visit. I spiked my short hair straight up into the air. I dug out my heaviest, oldest work boots, the ones with the chain saw cut that exposed the steel toe. I got my torn blue jeans and my leather jacket. There would be not a shred of ambiguity this Sunday morning. They would embrace me in my full Amazon glory, or they could fry ice.Gail then went on to talk about how that little old lady and that little church in Maine accepted her, guided her and appreciated her, so much so that she became the senior minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ann Arbor.
After that sermon, I was talking to some good GA folk and we all agreed that Gail’s sermon was one of the best we ever heard. I remarked about my experiences of working with Little Old Ladies, that I thoroughly enjoyed working them. I then said, it will be the Little Old Ladies who will save the world. For it is their compassionate, acceptance and appreciation of others that will win the day and guide us to help us bring the possibility of peace in the world. The others agreed with me. We need that kind of power of women in our lives, of compassion, acceptance and appreciation. We also need the power of women who speak truth to power, such as Brooksley Born, Sheila Bair, Elizabeth Warren and Holly Near. Obviously, we can’t all be women, but we can all learn from powerful women such as these women I have spoken about today. And if we can that, if we can listen carefully and understand, then I say there is still hope in the world for a better day. |
| Sermon Copyright © 2010 Harold W. Beu |
