Someone from my church’s yahoo group posted the op-ed article (linked below these comments) from yesterday’s L.A. Times. It’s about how politicians have prevailed in replacing an artistic likeness of one of California’s and my faith tradition’s heros, Thomas Starr King, with a more recent California hero, Ronald Reagan. I never have been a Reagan fan. Amongst the things I remember really disliking him for was his 1984 on-air radio address joke that he would send the bombs flying off to Russia in 5 mins. As someone who later studied Russian and loved the language, and someone from a state with a lot of nuclear weapons based there (Montana), I found nothing funny in that statement. Now that I’ve told you one little reason about why I don’t think Reagan should be memorialized AGAIN, let me tell you briefly why Starr King’s statue should stay. Besides having a poetic name and being an important figure in the history of my Unitarian Universalist tradition (we have a seminary in Berkley named after him), Starr King was influential in helping California become part of the anti-slavery Union It is ironic that Starr King campaigned for the immortal American hero, Abraham Lincoln (a Republican) and helped elect a Republican governor and the Republicans are the ones wanting to replace him.
Read more about Thomas Starr King on the Unitarian Universalist Historical Association website: http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/thomasstarrking.html
Oh, and contrary to what Mr. Cheevers writes, Starr King wasn’t a Unitarian Universalist. He was born to Universalist father and became a Unitarian minister. The two Protestant denominations only merged in America in 1961. Unitarian churches still exist in other parts of the world, most notably in Transylvania (now Romania). I’m not sure whether there are any churches that are still strictly Universalist.
Opinion Thomas Starr King deserves better
A statute of the Californian is being replaced by one of Ronald Reagan
in the U.S. Capitol. By Jack Cheevers Los Angeles Times
May 29, 2009 » Discuss Article
Comments)
What I remember Reagan for is all the people dying of AIDS while he did absolutely nothing and pretended like it wasn't happening.
ReplyDeleteI read that article in the Times and agree with you 100%. King's historical role in our country's racial history should not be wiped away due to current Republican party droolings over their cartoon hero, Ronnie.
ReplyDeleteI think I sounded partisan. Well, if you have strong opinions, you probably are partisan at least some of the time, right? Of course I like Starr King because I'm a Unitarian Universalist. But putting that and partisanship beside, he was a central figure in making sure CA didn't become a slave state! That's a really important fact of CA history. Everybody knows Ronald Reagan. Plenty of people revere him. Why can't we leave Starr King his little bit of historical credit?? That's my main point.
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