A Philomath city councilor’s recommendation to add a reference to God in the city’s inclusivity proclamation was revisited during the council’s July 14 meeting after it had been reviewed at the committee level.
Councilor Brent Kaseman had made the request at a June 9 meeting and the matter was sent to the Inclusivity Committee. Mayor Christopher McMorran and councilors Jessica Andrade and Diane Crocker are among those who serve on the committee.
“At the Inclusivity Committee meeting, it felt like there was a pretty strong feeling that folks didn’t really like the specific wording because they really wanted to respect separation of church and state and not having that be sort of pushed on people who may not believe that same way,” McMorran said.
Andrade took McMorran’s statement a step further and said that the committee was “definitely in strong opposition to that wording.”
As Kaseman had pointed out during his explanation at the June 9 meeting, he wrote in a letter to the Inclusivity Committee that as a parallel to his recommendation, the Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Kaseman followed up in the letter, “The writers of the Declaration understood that the equality of the people and their rights are not granted by governments, but rather belong to them naturally, bestowed upon them by their Creator.”
McMorran said the committee in the end agreed with the intent in Kaseman’s letter.
“The thing that I really liked in it was the idea that we’re not treating people with respect and people just don’t have rights because the City Council says so in a proclamation or because some document says so but that those are sort of inherent rights and unalienable rights that everybody has regardless of what a government entity says — so, we liked that,” McMorran said. “I think the committee just didn’t like the idea of directly attributing it to God.”
As a result, the suggested language for that particular line in the proclamation was “Philomath strives to be a city based on mutual respect and understanding, a community that welcomes and values all residents, and respects the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all people.”
McMorran said the committee landed on that language with considerations from the Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations.
Kaseman thanked the Inclusivity Committee for taking up the issue.
The revision to the proclamation passed on a 7-0 vote.
In my personal capacity: Thanks to everyone that engaged the conversation, in council and in the community! The question of “why” humans have inherent dignity and inalienable rights remains important. The UN’s Declaration says it has “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person…”, but it doesn’t say “why”; the assertion remains unjustified. The US’s Declaration grounds these rights/human dignities in the Creator. A question we can all ask ourselves is: “why do humans have inherent worth and dignity?” The answer to that question and the conclusions are important.