Telephone number for the "Ethical" Humanist Society & Skokie police below. Please forward widely too!
NEWS FLASH
 On Sunday, November 1st, plainclothes and
uniformed police who had been called in earlier by officials of the Ethical
Humanist Society of Chicago (EHSC) dragged out, maced and arrested a man for videotaping Sunsara Taylor as she
stood near her seat and made a statement before the start of that morning's
program about the shameful cancellation of her long planned talk to EHSC that
day on the topic "Morality without Gods."
The shocking incident took place at the
insistence of the president of EHSC. About 40 people witnessed the videographer
being brutalized by the police in the foyer of the facility. An attorney demanded that the police stop
brutalizing him when five officers piled on him as he lay face down on the
floor. 6 police cars arrived within
minutes.
The day before, during a workshop on the same
premises which the president and other board members of the EHS were at,
Sunsara explained very clearly that she would be attending the opening of the
EHS's Sunday gathering and giving the EHS the opportunity to do the right thing
and allow her talk to go forward, up until the last minute. If the EHS still refused to let her give her
talk, she explained that she would leave and give her talk in "exile" at the
nearby home of one of the EHS members.
[This statement can be viewed on YouTube
here.]
In her brief statement at the EHS on Sunday
morning, Sunsara Taylor challenged the very wrong decision to cancel her
speaking engagement and pointed out how this is contributing to a chilling
atmosphere in society as a whole and has happened all too frequently to people
who challenge the dominant narrative (like Ward Churchill, Noman Finkelstein
and the director of Milk who was recently "disinvited" from Hope College,
etc.). Taylor stated that while the
group had the "bureaucratic right" to disinvite her, it didn't make it any more
"right" than the voters in California passing Prop 8. She also invited those who wanted to hear her speak to come to
her "talk in exile" at the home of a member of the EHSC.
At no point during her brief statement was
Sunsara asked to stop speaking or to leave the premises. And at no point was anyone who was there to
support her, including the videographer, asked to leave. It is telling that the only person singled
out by the police, at the request of the president of the Society, was the man
documenting what Sunsara was saying.
The videographer was simply trying to document
and guard the truth of what Sunsara was saying in her brief statement. Sunsara's words had been grossly distorted
and taken out of context by some members of the EHSC who were the driving
forces behind canceling her speech.
What kind of ethics and morals is the EHSC
upholding and modeling through the great lengths it has gone to in suppressing
Sunsara Taylor's talk on Morality without Gods? A number of their own members expressed disagreement with the
cancellation and a number of prominent people from around the country wrote
statements in support of Sunsara's speaking and called on EHSC to rectify its
wrong-headed decision. Instead, the
board fortified and increasingly defended its decision and created an
atmosphere of anti-communist hysteria, fear and rumor-mongering that had no
relationship to reality.
The EHS had no legitimate basis to feel the
police needed to be there in the first place, except for the rumors and
hysteria that they themselves had created.
Then, by choosing to set the police upon the person filming they went
after the one person who was documenting the truth of Sunsara's words and the fact that Sunsara and others
there to support her were acting in no way to disrupt the replacement talk the
EHS had planned.
What kind of Ethical Humanist group would create
a situation that led directly to the brutal arrest of someone simply for
filming Sunsara giving a statement at that point with simply a cell phone? In their zeal to suppress Taylor they went
repeatedly against the stated purpose of the Ethical Humanist Society of
Chicago which includes "the supreme aim of human life is working to create a
more humane society...Our commitment is to the worth and dignity of the
individual and to treating each human being so as to bring out the best in her
or him."
 This attack was in stark contrast to the day
before at the EHSC where Sunsara led a well-attended and lively discussion with
much audience participation on Women's Liberation and the Emancipation of
Humanity. This whole program was
videotaped by the same volunteer videographer.
To call upon the EHSC to drop charges against
the videographer and to continue to express your disagreement with their
decision to dis-invite Sunsara Taylor, contact: off...@ethicalhuman.org and call 847-677-3334.
(For the background to this dis-invitation and statements of support for Sunsara, check her blog at http://sunsara.blogspot.com/).
To find out how to make contributions to the
legal defense, contact: sunsa...@yahoo.com.
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