Not all of us are old enough to remember the Virginia Slims cigarette ad campaigns of the 1970’s, but it harnessed the modern feminist movement for its own harmful-product marketing. It made the loud and proud smoking of cigarettes by women into a benchmark for equality with our male counterparts. Print ads displayed glamorous women of the 70’s openly smoking and smiling, juxtaposed with staged photos of early 20th century suffragettes sneaking a smoke outside of their controlling husband’s view. Virginia Slims immortalized their slogan, one which was hard to deny: "You've come a long way, baby."
Now, had women really come that far from 1920 to 1970? Maybe so, but that’s debatable. Even in the 1970’s there were still many obstacles and future victories that lay ahead of us: sexual harassment and discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, the struggle for our bodily and reproductive autonomy, domestic partner abuse, the stigma of single motherhood, equal pay, the glass ceiling, college rape culture, Title IX parity in college sports, proportional representation in legislatures and in the corporate (or school) board room, the the lack of women’s professional sports, the “me-too” movement. Oh yeah, ordination into the clergy. But was smoking cigarettes truly a legit marker for the progress of women’s rights? Not really, not at all.
This past March 12th, the word emerged from Spencerville SDA Church that nominations were being accepted for the 2023 episode of the annual Constituency Meeting (CM) of the Spencerville Adventist Aristocracy (SAA).
What is the CM you may ask? It is supposed to be a constitutionally-mandated act of oversight by the exclusive constituent church of SAA, namely the Spencerville SDA Church. It is the one time a year that the tightly-packed Aristocratic circle of wagons is bound to turn itself inside-out and separate just enough for some disinfecting sunlight to stream in. It’s a time where SAA’s head of school presents a report, followed by the finance committee (we’re big fans!), and the Home and School Association (we’re big fans!) on what has happened in the previous year.
In reality, it is a dumbed-down exercise of rubber-stamping whatever the head of school says. The most interesting part is watching the head of school deftly dodge hard questions and dissemble, and the SAA Board Chairperson heroically come to defend her against anyone challenging anything for which they seek real answers. But hey, it’s fun to hang out and listen to important information mingled with propaganda and trivia.
However it’s not really an enjoyable task for the Aristocracy, any more than a woman’s regular visit to the gynecologist, or a man’s periodic trudge to the proctologist. People don’t post those visits or the exam results to their social media. Neither does the Spencerville Adventist Aristocracy (SAA) do things like notify the families of its students that this event will happen, let alone stream it or archive it. (See our post “The Best Kept Secret") In fact, the only people that can know the real goings on and get reports in writing are the official CM delegates. Everyone else that bothers to show up for the show is relegated to fast and furious note-taking. By the way, if you want to know what really happened at the 2021 CM Show or the 2022 CM Show, we’ve got you covered.
Yet this year, Pastor Chad Stuart’s call for CM delegate nomination included some extra information that has never before been made public in the process - the names of current SAA School Board Members:
This is in stark contrast to the "ancient history" of 2021-2022 when the names of the school board members (who are supposed to represent parents and families’ concerns) were a tightly-held classified secret of Aristocratic institutional level existential jeopardy. (See the full back story in The Secret School Board Unmasked. ) But on March 12, 2023, Pastor Stuart simply laid them out for us – like an uncontested layup. As if to say with a wry chuckle, “Well of course, this is how we always do it! C’mon man, what were you expecting?”
Sure, they don't make their secret agendas and secret meeting minutes available to the school community, we don’t have a disclosed list of sub-committees, etc., nor is there a listing of which board members have held their seats for how many years or decades or generations, or a collective email address to send concerns, let alone contact information for the individual board members. Why not? Because Mrs. Bowerman unilaterally and secretly confiscated our school family directory without notice to anyone about 2 years ago. Still, disclosing the actual board members is measurable progress to be sure. In fact, it brings SAA up to par with what every other similar private institution has been doing for ages past. Welcome, Aristocrats, to the jungle of transparency and accountability.
And why have we bolded and italicized all forms of the word nominate? Well because even the tithe-paying, school tuition-paying, weekly-seated-in-the-pew members of Spencerville SDA Church don’t actually get to vote for individual delegates. Instead, they only nominate names. Those names are then taken into a secret and sequestered back room process of vetting the nominated names according to “qualifications provided in the SDA Church Manual”, a 234-page natural home remedy for insomnia.
Pastor Stuart even specified as follows: “I want to remind you that a nomination is not a vote. The vote happens at the second reading presentation of the selected individuals before the entire church....Each name will then be considered based on the qualifications provided in the Seventh-day Adventist Church Manual.”
What particular qualifications are those? They are not specified. We have heard other standards in the past including “members in good standing” and being a “baptized member of Spencerville Church”. But this year you also must also pass a secret test of unspecified “qualifications provided in the SDA Church Manual” (again, 234 pages in length). So basically, the qualifications are “whatever we say they are.”
And who does the “considering” of the nominees and prepares the roster for approval by the church at large? They are not specified. You don’t have the right to know.
In other words, the nominees are judged by a secret panel on their fitness and appropriateness to smile, golf-clap, ask no questions of substance, frown upon those who do, and then hold up a rubber stamp (actually a green card) at the CM. Our Eyes On SAA forum has received reports in the past about nominees being excluded for not meeting the aforementioned standards, and we see the disappearance from one year to the next of nominees who by making candid comments or asking hard questions of the head of school thus showed themselves not properly cowed for selection as an official CM delegate.
So we know quite well that this "Black Box" selection system of taking nominees and magically transforming them into official CM delegates is a RIGGED process in which Spencerville SDA Church members are disenfranchised by obvious delegate-fixing. It is reminiscent of Old South voter-suppression techniques such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.
Anyway, here are the people who made it through the black box nominating process into official SAA delegates. A fine group of people to be sure, and let us hope they prove us wrong by asking the difficult questions that need to be asked and insisting on full and substantive answers from SAA:
Then without explanation there was this late-breaking list of additional names first published subsequently on April 15 (just 8 days in advance of the CM):
Yet, let us not deprive the Aristocracy of recognition for its belated pubescent entry into the same level of representative transparency that peer institutions reached decades ago. Openly and proudly disclosing the SAA Board Membership as evidence that the struggle for institutional transparency is over is the Aristocratic equivalent of the Virginia Slims marketing campaign of the 1970’s - using cigarette smoking as a metric of equality for women. So we receive it with the same reservation and suspicion as the cigarette ads. Does disclosing the names of the (formerly Secret) School Board members - whilst not providing contact information for them, plus keeping shut the black box of CM delegate selection - actually mean that SAA has arrived at industry-level representative transparency? Not really. But it is a significant baby step and, perhaps, a sign that things appear headed in the right direction.
But what the heck, just for fun, let’s take that vintage Virginia Slims slogan and adapt it to this institution. So all together on 1-2-3: “SAA, you’ve come a long way, baby.”
-Lillian Hepburn-Richmond
(A Cohort of Concerned Parents)
Shining Light. Breaking Silence. Holding Accountable.
We’ve got Eyes On SAA.
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