I’m with ChaliceChick — wow! Look what’s going on at The Lively Tradition, Liberal Faith Development and her blog. Read for comments.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much written at one time among Unitarian Universalists about polyamory, polygamy and polyandry. Now, the reason why the subject has come up — and I’ll spare you my opinions, though I do have them — is there has been some reasonable speculation that the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association has deeply restricted the number (and therefor the scope) of independent affiliate organizations because of its unwillingness or inability to handle the application of a polyamory organization.
If that speculation is correct, then many historic and functional relationships and support networks have been sacrificed because the Board is unable to engage the Unitarian Universalist public in a transparent way to address to propriety of admitting Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness. Score one for the blogs. Score one for anyone who can deal with big problems transparently. But even if this speculation is false, how would we know? The Board process has been cloaked in halting process and gauzy language. The polys might be blamed but it wouldn’t be their fault. And as we well know, unanswered question only open new questions.
So who loses in the current blogger poly debate? The Board, because they didn’t do we we’re doing now. And that’ll hurt the UUA.
I’m a member of UUPA. Actually, everything we’ve been able to determine is that keeping us out was not what the IA decision was about — but that in a vacuum of explanation or discussion from the UUA board, people are naturally filling the vacuum with conspiracy theories. This is human nature. (Especially blogging nature.)
Also, for the record, UUPA has not applied for IA status under the new setup and probably won’t.