May 1, 2005

Rev. Henry Ticknor
Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley

He Who Steals My Good Name

This morning's sermon is the second of my two auction sermons for this year. The topic for this morning came out of a conversation I had with Dan Couch about a rather mundane problem most of us have to deal with in our everyday lives—junk mail.

Now as Dan and I got to talking we realized that the problem isn't so much with the mail itself, although I will have some things to say about that as well, but more, the problem lies in our loss of privacy.

Who is sending us this stuff, and why? Who sold my name without my knowledge? Why does this business or that political action group think I am a likely customer? But let me begin with a story I came across on the Internet as I was researching what I wanted to say.

It seems that a certain Brian Dear, and I have no idea if this is his real name, decided to join the American Civil Liberties Union--the ACLU. He stated that he did this because of his desire to do some small thing that might help to, in his words, “preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States."

So, Mr. Dear went on-line found the ACLU home page, clicked on the membership page, and supplied his name and address, his credit card number, and paid his $20 to join.

Again, according to Mr. Dear's story, "Not even a week had gone by before the deluge began. Big, thick, colorful envelopes arrived, not from the ACLU, but from the Sierra Club, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, the Nature Conservancy, Americans for this, Americans for that, Yadda, Yadda, Yadda. Organization after organization.

Most of them I had never heard of." In fact, Mr. Dear received a good deal of this material before he received anything back from the ACLU.

Quickly, Mr. Dear assumed that there was a direct connection between joining the ACLU and his receiving all this junk mail from non-profit organizations. So he decided to contact the ACLU to see why his name had been given out to so many other organizations against his personal wishes.

He first corresponded with Anthony Romero, the Executive Director of the ACLU who told Mr. Dear that the ACLU was "no different than most other non-profit organizations, which identifies potential new members through exchanging membership lists with other like-minded organizations." However, he did agree to stop sharing Mr. Dear's name with other organizations.

Well, the deluge of unwanted mail just continued so he wrote back to the ACLU and asked them to contact each and every organization that had received his name and to notify them to immediately stop sending materials to his home and to remove his name from their lists.

A second nice letter came back from the ACLU assuring Mr. Dear that his name had been removed from their list, however, "because of the double blind nature of the name sharing system, it is impossible for us to know what organizations may have received your name."

Well, even Mr. Dear soon realized he was up against a much larger problem and as he had a life to live he let things go. Fast-forward a year and Mr. Dear receives a begging letter asking him to renew his membership and, if possible, to please increase his donation.

He refused to renew. And in a lengthy reply to the ACLU he stated his reason: he felt the organization had violated his privacy. But, apparently Mr. Dear's campaign for privacy bore some fruit.

According to the privacy statement at the ACLU homepage, each subscriber now has multiple chances to opt-out of having any personal information shared with third parties. Thank you, Mr. Dear. To borrow a famous quotation , "He who steals my good name, steals all that I have," said Shakespeare's Falstaff.

Junk mail is a serious issue. The average American household receives more than 500 pieces of junk mail each year. This comes out to 41 pounds of mail per year most of which goes unread into the trash. The average American is on over 50 mailing lists.

The impact on our natural resources is also significant. Americans receive 1.5 trees in their mailbox in the form of unsolicited mail every year. This adds up to 100 million trees annually. The energy expended in the production of junk mail that we receive in just one day could be used to heat 250,000 homes. We pay $370,000,000 a year to dispose of junk mail.

Finally the average American spends 8 full months of their life opening junk mail.

When I was thinking about this sermon I asked Dan and Dierdre to collect all of their junk mail for three weeks or so. In all they received 53 catalogues from various companies, 30 letters asking for money from a variety of good causes, a postcard from the USDA asking to be told what crops they intended to plant, a notice that they had been selected as a Neilson family and something from a fellow in Irvine, California wanting to buy any spare acreage they might have on hand.

And finally, whether it came in the US mail or was simply left in their mailbox a small, yellow, religious tract on the importance of reading the Bible. In all, there were almost 90 pieces of unwanted, unsolicited, and ultimately unopened mail.

So what is our right to privacy? The legal right to privacy has been recognized in this country since the late 1890's when Justice Louis Brandeis defined privacy as the "right to be left alone." His full statement reads, "The makers of the constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men(sic)--the right to be left alone."

Although the right to privacy is not mentioned in the constitution, it is generally agreed that we have a right to be left alone and to be free of unwanted public scrutiny.

The Bill of Rights does suggest some right to privacy as it limits the government's ability to interfere in our personal lives. The First Amendment protects our freedom of speech, assembly, and worship, as well as protections for the materials we choose to read, create or view in the privacy of our own homes.

The Fourth Amendment limits the government's intrusion into our homes, and personal belongings. And the Fifth Amendment protects us from being forced to reveal personal information. And so on.

The problem with our right to privacy seems to me to be the rate at which technology is enabling individuals to share all kinds of personal information with or without our consent.

A few weeks ago I drove to a meeting outside of Philadelphia. If anyone was interested, data from my Easy Pass toll paying device would show that I, or someone driving my car, passed through the toll plazas on the Dulles Access road; a certain time later my car passed through the Harbor Tunnel in Baltimore; and a toll plaza in Delaware.

My cell phone records would indicate that my phone, which has a GPS location device, was used several times in King Of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and that the next day I returned home by the same route.

These days caller ID identifies who is calling us and lets others know we are calling them. When I call for a pizza delivery, Anthony's or Pizza Hut can access my address in a blink of an eye and some of the larger chains maintain databases on what you order so that you can just say "the usual" without having to detail your order each time.

Recently I went on-line and did a search on my name. Not too many surprises, lots of sermons, a couple of newspaper items about my days with the Fairfax County Public Schools, a few references to my name in the Winchester Star. But the most interesting was a 9-11 conspiracy theory site that quoted me as an eyewitness to the attack on the Pentagon. Comments, attributed to me, but printed without my knowledge or permission were used to support the notion that it may not have been a plane that struck the Pentagon, but rather a missile. The web page says, "This is the only witness statement that seems to have caught the white smoke…which would agree with a missile being fired. Henry Ticknor, intern minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, Virginia…was driving to church that Tuesday morning when American Airlines flight 77 came in fast and low over his car and truck the Pentagon. "There was a puff of white smoke and then a billowing black cloud."

Where did that come from? No idea, unless it was lifted from a UU World Magazine article for which I was interviewed at some length as an eyewitness. You see on the morning of September 11, I was driving down Rt. 50 on my way to work at the Arlington UU Church when I saw a plane dive below the tree line and an immediate explosion. I did tell the World Magazine about the smoke; I never said the plane came in fast and low over my car, as I was five miles from the point of impact. Where is my right to privacy?

It is no wonder that most Americans worry that they have lost all control over personal information. It doesn't take computer sleuths long to be able to create a large file on any one of us that contains our personal histories: education, addresses, telephone numbers, present and previous addresses. With a phone bill some are even able to access credit information.

In spite of all this data that is out there, we are also fairly willing to give out information. Many of us fill out warranty cards that ask for much more than what brand appliance we bought, we order books and more online, and work is being done to create a nationwide hospital data base to track in-patient care.

So what's a person to do? When I post this sermon on the web--where anyone in the world with internet access will be able to read it, I will add a few of the recommended places to go for information about diminishing the amount of unwanted solicitations we receive.

Everyday our mailboxes fill up with stuff we did not ask for being sent from people we do not know and all too often it is material that we may find offensive. We already have a nationwide do not call list; now what we need is a nation wide do not mail list.

In a book published last year, the Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz writes, "Many years ago, the distinguished political philosopher Isaiah Berlin made an important distinction between "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." Negative liberty is "freedom from"--freedom from constraint, freedom from being told what to do by others.

Positive liberty is "freedom to"--the availability of opportunities to be the author of your life and to make it meaningful and significant.

My sense is that as more and more personal data is gathered by those who would misuse and abuse it, our freedom from being told what to do is being constantly eroded. What are the worthiest causes that deserve our attention? Which political candidates are worth our support? How many ecological, humanitarian or global causes can we support? How much is enough?

Public radio used to send me one annual begging letter a year. Now, I seem to get one a month and I am sure they are "banking" on my poor memory and hope I will send in another contribution. How often do we get solicitations to renew magazines or receive ads in the guise of real mail that dupe us into opening the envelop before we realize we've been had?

Indeed, this glut of unwanted and unsolicited information is more than just annoying it becomes onerous and wastes more and more of our precious resources. I am sure that all of us value our freedom from coercive attempts to manipulate our time, money and privacy.

Likewise I cherish the freedom to be the author of my own life; to make it meaningful and significant. And this brings me back to the little religious track that was in Dan's pile of junk mail.

If our fundamental liberties include the right of being left alone and not being told what to do by others, then why are we constantly being subjected to right wing Christian thinking? Why are we not free from being told what religion we should profess? In Thursday night's press conference President Busch said as much when he responded to one query on his personal faith by saying:

As I said, I think faith is a personal issue. And I take great strength from my faith. But I don't condemn somebody in the political process because they may not agree with me on religion.

The great thing about America is that you should be allowed to worship any way you want. And if you chose not to worship, you're equally as patriotic as somebody who does worship. And if you choose to worship, you're equally American if you're a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim.

Now I wonder how that played at such conservative religious outlets as Focus on the Family and The Family Research Council who have insisted that this country needs more federal judges who are Christian and conservative. My hunch is they don't like it when the President advocates diversity of belief, including the right not to believe and not to worship.

The freedom to discern what is true, the freedom to believe or not to believe is a cornerstone of our Unitarian Universalist Beliefs. The free and responsible search for truth and meaning is one of our seven principles along with the right of conscience and the democratic process.

Ours is indeed a religion that advocates both the "freedom from"--freedom from constraint, freedom from being told what to do by others and the "freedom to" be the authors of our lives and to make them meaningful and significant.

Our privacy, our right to be left alone, is becoming an endangered privilege. From what brand of toothpaste we prefer, to what political party we support, to where we choose to worship or not, the vast amount of public information can easily erode our sense of worth and dignity.

As technology advances and new innovations come along that make life simpler, more efficient or more convenient we must be aware of how these benefits may come with a trade-off: efficiency or privacy.

One marketing researcher has offered us this advice. "Make yourself poor--real poor. Don't have any credit cards. Don't have a computer. Don't own your own home. In fact, don't say you own anything. Don't have any kids, but do be married--otherwise you'll get bombarded by singles groups! Do not be 18 to 24 years of age…or 18 to 49 the ages that advertisers covet.

Be sure to express consumer disloyalty wherever possible. For example when they ask you how many times you've changed long distance carriers, say, "constantly."

And if they ask you about education say you've had tons, because uneducated consumers are considered the easiest marks. If you have a PhD, they are hard pressed to figure out what to do with you."

It may seem a stretch to go from junk mail to freedom of religion, but I don't think it's too far a stretch. Everyday we hear and read about attempts to influence government and by extension to influence our own lives by the religious right.

We need to be vocal in our support of our freedoms and our right to privacy. For once they are gone; I doubt they would soon be recovered. So, let us all remember Shakespeare's admonition that he who steals my good name, steals all that I have.

Amen and Blessed be