The gray wave that wasn’t

November 7, 2018

Back in March, Friends Jour­nal and the Earl­ham School of Reli­gion co-hosted an online dis­cus­sion with six Quak­er can­di­dates for con­gres­sion­al seats. The idea and coor­di­na­tion came from the awe­some Greg Woods. I went to see just how high the 2018 “gray wave” had crested.

Spoil­ers: no wave. Four of the can­di­dates didn’t make it out of the pri­maries and a fifth was run­ning as an inde­pen­dent in a long-shot can­di­da­cy. The one can­di­date to win major-party pri­ma­ry was the awe­some Shaw­na Roberts1 of Bar­nesville, Ohio. Shawna’s one of the most down-to-earth, real, peo­ple I know and it was a lot of fun to fol­low her cam­paign. Her twit­ter feed has been a hoot:

Unfor­tu­nate­ly Shaw­na only got about 30 per­cent of the vote yes­ter­day. This elec­tion was not kind to Democ­rats in rur­al dis­tricts like south­east Ohio’s 6 and she was run­ning against an incum­bent. From my van­tage point 30 per­cent seems pret­ty good, though as my sev­enth grade math teacher used to intone in his weary bari­tone, close only counts in horse­shoes and hand grenades. 2 Still, the prospect of a Mrs Roberts Goes to Wash­ing­ton win had me hop­ing against the odds. I’d love to see her con­tin­ue to be involved: 2020 is only two years away.

Stats on everyone’s results are at the updat­ed Quak­ers in Pol­i­tics page. For any­one won­der­ing about Quak­er politi­cians, Paul Buck­ley had a nice overview of our com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship to vot­ing a few years ago.

“The drafters of the statement included Quaker Symon Hill who has written of…

November 1, 2011

“The drafters of the state­ment includ­ed Quak­er Symon Hill who has writ­ten of the state­ment: “As one of the drafters of the state­ment, I want to make clear that we want to act in sol­i­dar­i­ty with peo­ple of oth­er reli­gions and of none, not impose our reli­gion on them or claim to be a more impor­tant part of the move­ment than they are. This point is made in the open­ing line of the statement.”

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A Quak­er pres­ence at Occu­py London
Almost 100 Quak­ers attend­ed a Meet­ing for Wor­ship on the steps of saint Paul’s cathe­dral in Lon­don on Sun­day after­noon. The Meet­ing for Wor­ship took place in sup­port of the Occu­py Lon­don move­ment that… 

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