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BARCAT in 2011
BARCAT was busy in 2011. In January, we launched the first edition of the BARCAT eNews. The Perspectives column has featured guest writers including Rev. Natalie Chamberlain (United Christian Church, Fresno); Rev. Will McGarvey (Pittsburg Community Church, Pittsburg), Rev. Diana Gibson, Geoffrey Gaskins, M.Div. (ministerial candidate, United Church of Christ, Corey Weinstein (ORGANIZATION), and Louise Specht (BARCAT Convener). We’ve heard from other affiliates of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) partners that the design and content of our eNews is a model for their own communications.
In March, Geoffrey Gaskins received a grant from NRCAT to attend the Toward a Moral Consensus conference at Duke University in North Carolina. We have learned that there is growing concern in religious communities around the United States about U.S.-sponsored torture, and that a broad spectrum of faith perspectives have taken up the cause as a sacred responsibility.
One of our biggest projects—and biggest successes—in 2011 was a partnership in May with the TEARS ministry team at First Congregational Church of Berkeley to bring a proposal to the Annual Meeting of the Northern California-Nevada Conference of the United Church of Christ asking them to endorse the NRCAT Statement on the OPCAT, and they did by a nearly unanimous vote by religious leaders in that denomination from all around northern California.
Our June Torture Awareness month project focused on asking the Senate Intelligence Committee to release a public version of the upcoming report on the U.S. torture program. Partnering with the Los Angeles Area Religious Campaign Against Torture, we arranged meetings at three of Senator Feinstein’s California offices in Fresno, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. BARCAT members in northern California circulated the “We Need to Know” petition and delivered almost 400 signatures to Sen. Feinstein’s San Francisco office.
Our The Truth About Torture presentation was delivered at the Jewish Shavuot observance at the Jewish Community Center in Berkeley and to the First Congregational Church of Palo Alto. Louise Specht has continued to forge relationships with Muslim faith communities and presented the NRCAT DVD Preventing Torture Forever to a gathering at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California.
In August, the California prisoners’ hunger strike took center stage. BARCAT was instrumental in getting a religious representative on a panel speaking before the California Assembly Public Safety Committee at a hearing last August. BARCAT Clergy Supporter Rev. Will McGarvey gave powerful testimony at the hearing, speaking of the moral impact of long term solitary confinement on prisoners, guards, and on society as a whole. We worked with several other groups to organize a rally on the Capitol steps where members of various faith communities carried signs and banners.
BARCAT writers were successful in 2011 getting several letters to the editor published in northern California newspapers. BARCAT petition drives, within BARCAT congregations and in public spaces around the greater Bay Area, were
