Chatrooms and Classifieds

Sounded intriguing didn't it?

Below is an article I wrote intending it to be published in our local newspaper, the Burlington Free Press. Apparently it didn't make the cut. So it ended up here, where all my stuff that doesn't make the cut ends up.


Two stories. Both involving the Free Press. Each revealing the difficulties we as a community face when it comes to talking about race, religion, and other matters of contention.

I am the pastor of the United Church of Colchester. Right now we are in the search for a new church musician and we chose to advertise in the classifieds section of both the Free Press and another local paper. The ad we came up with was (I thought) a fairly simple one:

Organist and/or pianist. United Church of Colchester. 9-12 choir members. Thursday night practice. Christian faith preferred.

Both newspapers said they would be happy to run the ad, but would have to remove "Christian faith preferred" in order to conform to their Classifieds policies. One of the ad reps I spoke with said the statement was "discriminatory" and could get the paper and our church in "a lot of trouble."

The second story comes from a recent Free Press story about the absence of any black teachers in the Burlington School District, and the district's efforts to recruit more teachers of color. Response to that article in the paper's online "Storychat" was heated enough to force the Free Press to close down the online forum. I remember that when a Free Press editorial called for increased teacher diversity last fall things got pretty animated also. One person in the chat room went so far as to label the district's employment of a full-time diversity coordinator "tax payer rape." Things must have gotten even more heated this time to warrant shutting down the conversation.

At the heart of both these stories is a question over affirmative action. More specifically, it is a question about how to best take affirmative action to ensure we do not discriminate on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, physical disability, or sexual preference in our hiring practices.

I am not very hopeful that we, in our varied religious and political convictions, are going to come up with an interpretation that will satisfy everyone. I am a little more hopeful, however, that most will agree that the United Church of Colchester ought to be able to state publicly that faith is a central and bona fide consideration for us. As I told one of the ad reps I discussed the matter with, "We are a church, after all."

But in any case, I think the two stories illustrate how difficult it is to have a public conversation about competing values today. The way between stultifying political correctness and stultifying acerbic is a narrow one. When we run aground on charged terms like "discriminatory" and "tax payer rape" how are we to go on? The only option is to shut down the chat room.

As Vermonters we are better than that. We should show it by agreeing to conduct our public discourse in a more civil way, and give those on the other side of our debates something that is sorely lacking these days — grace.