Platform
Meetings – 2005
December 18
Polly Weiss, Vice President, NC Society for Ethical Culture
A Winter Solstice Celebration
Platform Overview: Our Winter Solstice Celebration is a celebration
of our connections to each other, and to our natural world.
Winter Solstice Celebrations are very old, dating back at least
4,000 years. Our celebration will include poetry, music, song,
and reflections.
December 4
Dan Pollitt, Kenan Professor Emeritus, UNC School of Law
Advice and Consent of the Senate
November 20
Randy Best, Ethical Culture Leader
A Stone Soup Thanksgiving Celebration
November 6
Robin Kirk, Coordinator, Duke Human Rights Initiative
Restoring Rights: What We Lost and Where We Can Recover Post 9/11
Platform Overview: There are new challenges we face in the
protection of human rights. The speaker will use her Colombia
work as a case study, but will also use it to ask the question
of how much ground has been lost in the struggle for human
rights. The talk will then examine where we (who care about
such things) can recover, recoup and restore progress.
October 16
James Coley, President, NC Society for Ethical Culture
Fall Membership Meeting
Platform Overview: This platform is geared toward the administration
and business side of the society. The President and Board members,
and committee chairs will report on society activities, and
solicit member feedback.
October 2
Molly Beacham, Director of Development, Democracy North Carolina
Campaign Finance Reform as a Social Justice Issue
Platform Overview: Money in politics threatens democracy.
Here in North Carolina, public financing of judicial campaigns
gives candidates an alternative to the money chase. We are
working to expand public financing to the legislative and executive
branches. Learn how public financing in Maine and Arizona results
in policies in the best public interest.
September 18
Chris Saade, Director, The Intentional Living Institute, Inc.
The Co-Creation of Values
Platform Overview: This multimedia presentation will present
a powerful tool to allow the co-creation of value rich moments,
and the transformation of conflict into a moment of celebration,
authnecity, solidarity and generosity. Joining Mr. Saade in
conducting this platform presentation are Anne Dickerson, Kevin
Brock, Casey Baxter Robertson, & Polly Weiss.
September 4
Carissa Merlos-Boram
Closing the School of the Americas
Platform Overview: The talk will cover the history and background
of the school, connections between the SOA and human rights
abuses in Latin America, and efforts to close the school and
to prosecute offenders. It will review some diverse perspectives
on the topic/issue, but will make the case that this is another
example of the US government's inappropriate influence over
and intervention in the Latin American region.
August 21
Bill Brooks, Communications Committee Chair, NC-Committee to Defend Health
Care
Healthcare for All North Carolinians
August 7
Jim Warren, NC Waste and Reduction Network (NCWARN)
The Proliferation of Nuclear Power Plants
July 17
Platform Overview: Can the Tarheel State become the first
in the nation to outlaw torture and extreme rendition by making
it a felony offense to commit such crimes in the State of North
Carolina? Rep. Luebke is the primary sponsor of House Bill
2417 which would do just this.
See also NCSEC Resolution: Stop Torture in North Carolina
Tal Maoz, Community Shaliach, Israel Strives for Peace
July 3
NCSEC Members & Friends
Reflections on Freedom
Platform Overview: Members and friends of the society will
speak on what freedom means to each and/or what concerns each
presently has about it. The presentations will consider freedom
at any level from the political/economic to the very personal/psychological.
June 19
Prof. Arthur Benavie, Professor Emeritus, Economics, UNC at Chapel Hill
The Perils of Privatizing Social Security
Platform Overview: What are the implications of President
Bush’s plan to partially privatize Social Security by
allowing younger workers to divert a portion of their payroll
taxes into personal retirement accounts? Privatization will
incur numerous costs that are not mentioned by the government
or the media Ð such as, the exorbitant administrative costs
of private accounts, offsetting cuts in Social Security benefits,
the necessity for the creation of new government agencies,
and the burdens of an increased public debt. The upshot of
these costs is that privatization will hurt many if not most
workers and will dismantle the most successful and popular
domestic program in American history.
June 5
Mark Kleinschmidt, Staff Attorney, Center for Death Penalty Litigation
Fatal Flaws in the Death Penalty
Platform Overview: The death penalty is often touted as a
fair and legitimate vehicle for addressing the taking of one
person's life by another. In practice the death penalty is
fatally flawed because it actually denies justice to those
who are accused of murder, ensnaring those who either do not
possess the financial means to adequately defend themselves
or do not possess the level of culpability the death penalty
laws contemplate. In recent years DNA evidence, poor lawyering
and prosecutorial misconduct have exonerated a number of innocent
people on death row across the country which raises the question "How
did this happen?"
May 15
Paul Piersma
Vietnam: Lessons Revisited
See the Vietnam Bibliography compiled by Amy Piersma
May 1
Randy Best, Ethical Culture Leader
Doubt, Faith, & Truth
Platform Overview: René Descartes said, "Nothing
is certain. But what, then, am I? A thinking thing, it has
been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that
doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses;
that imagines also, and perceives." Doubt informs my interactions
with the world. I celebrate doubt as a source of openness and
possibility. Doubt is a creative alternative to the pitfalls
of certainty. Yet a certain amount of faith is necessary in
order to motivate me from the paralysis of existential uncertainty.
A certain leap of faith -- the willingness to make foundational
assumptions -- is required for me to act in the world. I assume
reality exists independent of my own mind. The world is real
and knowable.
Our understanding of our human experience is enriched by studying
philosophy, art, literature, music and religion. Our understanding
of truth, what is real, emerges out of our own experience and
our shared understanding of the experience of others. Our objective
model of reality is developed through the scientific method.
Our ethics and morality are informed by science, human experience
and human interests.
The virtues of doubt, faith and truth will be explored during
this Platform. Consideration will be given on how these virtues
influence ethical behavior.
April 17
Anu Kumar, PhD, MPH Executive Vice-President of IPAS
Women's Lives, Women's Health: Abortion at Home and Abroad
Platform Overview: This presentation will cover the global
dimensions of unsafe abortion and what can be done to prevent
it. The speaker will describe the work of Ipas, a 30-year-old,
Chapel Hill based non-profit organization that is dedicated
to reducing abortion-related deaths and disabilities.
April 3
Richard I. Wark, Ph.D., Adjunct Professor, University of Maryland-European
Division
The Social Construction of Rank: Implications and Cures
Platform Overview: The pain caused by the division of the
world into "Somebodies and Nobodies" was discussed
by Robert W. Fuller in his 2003 incisive book. This talk will
briefly discuss Fuller's seminal work and then examine implications
and extensions of the concept into the social, political, and
even spiritual spaces we currently inhabit. It is intended
that this discussion will encourage each of us to personally
examine the ways that rank plays out in our own lives and interactions.
March 20
Ellen O'Grady, Artist & Social Justice Activist
Outside the Ark
Platform Overview: Outside the Ark is a collection of Ms.
O'Grady's art which tells the stories of individual Palestinians
living in the West Bank. It links these stories and her own
story through a remembering of the Biblical flood story. The
work is exhibited in the form of a slide-show/storytelling
performance, in paintings exhibitions, and in a book of the
same name. It has been reaching people at a variety of venues,
including art galleries, public libraries, colleges, high schools
and places of worship.
March 6
Stefanie Richards, Coordinator, Hear Our Public Employees (HOPE)
Public Employees and Collective Bargaining
Platform Overview: North Carolina’s public employees,
both state and local, should have the right to bargain collectively
for enforceable agreements that govern the terms and conditions
of their employment, a right already enjoyed by most private
sector workers in the state. The HOPE coalition has been formed
to help gain this fundamental right for all North Carolina
public employees. One of the major goals of the coalition is
to obtain repeal of North Carolina General Statute 95 – 98,
which currently prohibits such agreements. Public sector workers
who obtain the right to collective bargaining would realize
substantial gains, specifically a mechanism to insure fairness
on the job.
February 20
Dilip Barman, President, Triangle Vegetarian Society
Introduction to Animal Rights Philosophy
Platform Overview: What are "rights" and what kind
of system bestows these rights? Do animals have rights and,
if they do, in what context does this make sense? Are there
ethical guidelines that suggest how people should interact
with non-human animals? This presentation, based on material
available on the web here, will introduce compassionate folks,
vegetarian or not, to the concepts behind the contemporary
animal rights movement.
February 6
Gerda Lerner, Robinson-Edwards Professor of History, Emerita, UW-Madison, Honorary
Member of the History Department, Duke University
The Creation of Patriarchy
Platform Overview: Professor Lerner will discuss why and how
societies in the Ancient Near East decided, in the 2nd millennium
BCE, to categorize men and women as different genders with
supposedly different characteristics and to organize their
societies in such a way that males controlled property, the
sexuality and reproductive capacity of women, and the symbol
system.
January 16
Jan Broughton, President, NC Society for Ethical Culture
Annual Meeting of Members
January 2
Bernard Gert, Stone Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, Dartmouth
Common Morality
