New affiliation with the Friends Committee on (US) National Legislation

I am very happy to announce the start of a new affiliation I have taken up, as “Friend in Washington” with the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), which is the very experienced lobbying organization that US members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) maintains on Washington’s Capitol Hill.
Longtime JWN readers should be well aware of the importance that my membership of a Quaker Meeting (congregation) has for me, and for my writings and other activities on social and political issues. Actually, having this blog has allowed me to do a lot to start “coming out” as a fairly public Quaker over the past few years. Now, taking up this affiliation with FCNL seems like a good next move in this direction, and I am extremely moved by their invitation to me to do this.
The Quakers are one of the historic “peace churches,” having upheld their (our) testimonies against war and violence, and in support of the equality and wellbeing of all human beings, for more than 350 years. FCNL describes itself as “A Quaker lobby in the public interest.” It is a very well-run, Quaker-led organization that focuses on trying to build the kinds of principled and respectful relationships with legislators in Washington in which “friendly persuasion”– exercised both in Washington and by FCNL’s nationwide network of Quaker and other supporters– will bring these legislators closer to working for such important public-interest goals as ending war, reducing military budgets, extending health-care coverage to all Americans, respect of Native American rights, and ending torture.
FCNL has done a lot of very productive work on issues that I care deeply about, including most definitely the whole US engagement in Iraq; and I’ve had many good conversations over the past 2-3 years with their Executive Secretary, Joe Volk, and members of his staff. So I’m looking forward to seeing where this new affiliation, which in the first instance has a term of six months, can lead all of us.
I understand it’s paradoxical that I start this affiliation while being in Cairo at the beginning of a three-month sojourn outside the US! But FCNL says in the announcement they issued about my new affiliation, “We will keep in close touch with her, and are confident that her experiences there will only strengthen the contribution she is able to make.”
Also, to mark this new relationship I have put the “Friendly (Quaker) links and concerns” section of my sidebar up near the top there, and I’ll keep it there for the next few weeks… So if you want to find out more about FCNL and other aspects of (mainly US) Quaker life, please go and explore some of those links.
The largest numbers of Quakers in the world are, actually, in Africa, and I’ll try to get some African links into that section when I can.
In the Middle East there has been a 120-plus-year presence of Quakers in both Palestine and Lebanon. In both those countries Quakers have maintained excellent schools and have small congregations of worshipers. In addition, in 1948 the American Friends Service Committee took on responsibility for providing all the international relief services that were given to the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had flooded into Gaza during the Palestinian-Jewish/Israeli fighting of 1947-48; and it continued to do that work for ten months until the UN had finally organized itself enough to establish UNRWA, which has done the job there, and elsewhere, ever since then.
You can find out more about Quakers’ involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian issue if you read When the Rain Returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel a group-authored Quaker book that I helped work on, that came out in 2004.
Anyway, now I guess I need to get used to thinking of myself as a “Friend in Washington (on Assignment).”