Vote your values. Vote early. Bring friends.

Did you know? The mission of Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice is to advance equitable national policies and actions aligned with UU values through engagement, education, and advocacy.

Theological Grounding for UU Commitment to Democracy
(October, 2024, commentary by Meleah Houseknecht, Minneapolis, MN, and vice chair of the Board of Trustees of UUSJ)

Fresh off of the inspiring and energizing events of the UU Climate Justice Revival, with its message of hope and reimagined possibility for our relationships with the earth and with each other, I can’t help but think about what it means to ground our relationships at all scales in love, equity, and justice. Particularly, as we move from the individual and personal scale to the organization and congregation, and on to community and the nation. If we are going to build a “spirit-filled and liberatory future,” as climate justice requires us to do, we must work on and through relationships of trust, but also generative conflict—relationships that value, learn from, and find creative possibilities in diversity and difference. In other words, we are going to need democracy.

The idea that all people should have a say in the decisions that impact them is a core theological commitment of Unitarian Universalism—so much so that we have codified this commitment in our covenants to one another for more than 60 years. But we don’t always stop to remember why our core beliefs call us to work tirelessly, and sometimes even risk our own comfort and safety, for a particular form of government.

As Unitarian Universalists, we come together around the shared belief that “every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.” We proclaim that justice is manifested in the recognition of what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “respect [for] the dignity and worth of all human personality.” Unitarian Universalism teaches us that human equality is a necessary and natural outcome of humanity’s shared divinity, and that equity becomes justice when we build our communities, and our society, around the central principle of love and the idea that every person matters. 

True belief in human equality forces us to eschew hierarchical and authoritarian systems of power and decision making and to embrace democracy as a means of social relationship on every level—even and especially in moments of conflict, when mutual respect and care are most challenging and most needed. 

We cannot forget that our commitment to democracy comes from and runs as deep as our affirmation of human equality—the theological concept out of which it was born. Through democracy we exercise our individual “right of conscience,” but we draw that right of conscience from our shared belief that we are divine and deserving of self-determination precisely because we are of the same ultimate substance—not because we are smart or sophisticated, educated or enterprising, but because we are human.

Read Meleah’s full commentary here

Here at the UU Fellowship of Plattsburgh
Since 2020, our congregation has partnered with Center for Common Ground and their Reclaim Our Vote team. Most recently, we wrapped up our writing initiative with the Team Unity GA coalition — sending over 4,000 postcards to registered Black voters in Georgia, where basic civil rights are threatened, to emphasize that their vote is consequential. We urged Early Voting to avoid overly long lines and other Election-Day hazards Black voters have experienced due to targeted voter suppression.