The sexual revolution and the young
Although it was not my fortune, good or bad, to be in Denver for the General Convention last July, when that assemblage concluded I was left with a feeling of depression similar to Julie Wortman's (see TW 10/00, ed. notes). This state has worsened as I read "The Comfortable Pew," written by Pierre Bonnet in 1965. Thirty-five years ago this non-churchman, evaluating the Canadian Anglicanism from the outside at the invitation of the Church, observed many of the same inequities talked about today. Two of those are related: the nuances of the sexual revolution and the perceptions and convictions of the young.
In the course of the open hearing on sexuality resolutions at Convention a highschool student from Minnesota made a poignant statement. She observed that the Church was no longer communicating to her generation. Specifically, she referred to sexual preference and gender identification. In her school, she said, those were nothing more than facets of an individual of no more significance than hair color.
As Michael Kinnamon is quoted as having said, devotion to reconciliation is self-defeating when it results in failure to confront actions blatantly opposed to the message of love. Hating the sin while loving the sinner is an indefensible position, leading as it does to the implicit message that all would be well if you would become like me. At the base is fear, clearly expressed by the racist who observed, "If the Black gets his rights, who does the poor White have to feel superior to?"
In the more than 30 years I have been reading The Witness I have seldom been disappointed. Keep on going on!
Jack McAnally
Wilsonville, OR

Looking good
Today we received our first two issues, September and October 2000. They look good! Reading the October letters, we find a laudatory reference to your April 2000 issue, "No Easy Answers: Gender and Sexual Ethics for a New Age." Please send us a copy of this and any other recent issues on glbt concerns right away.
Bob and Gwenny Bergh
Riverside, CA

Not activist enough
Please remove my name from your subscription list. It is probably a good magazine for some, but not activist enough for me.
Arlene E. Swanson
Minneapolis, MN

Holiday conscience
We are writing to ask Witness readers to join in the People of Faith Network's Holiday Season of Conscience Campaign aimed at Kohl's. The jeans Kohl's sells are made by sewers at Chentex, a Taiwanese-owned factory in Managua, Nicaragua. Although under Nicaraguan law forming a union is legal, Chentex management and owners are responding by firing and threatening workers who attempt to organize. The Chentex factory produces 20,000 to 25,000 pairs of jeans a day for Kohl's. The sewers earn pennies for each $30 pair of Kohl's jeans they sew. (For more info., see <www.nlcnet.org>).
The U.S. Labor Department has dispatched an investigator to the scene, but without a word from Kohl's, the customer, Chentex is unlikely to listen. So we are asking people of faith to write letters to Larry Montgomery, CEO of Kohl's Corporation, N56 W17000 Ridgewood Dr., Menomonee Falls, WI 53051, <Larry_Montgombery@kohls.com>. It doesn't have to be a long letter, or a partisan letter -- even a "letter of inquiry" asking Kohl's what is happening in Nicaragua is valuable.
David W. Dyson
pofn@clould9.net