Opening Plenary Session

Ah, the joys of the first plenary session. Setting the bar, going through announcements, and setting the rules of order. We are now voting on Rules 3 and 4…of 40. Someday we shall make it through. So far things have gone without discussion and passed easily. I think, however, that a few issues will come up. I’ll start typing when things start getting interesting.
Major Change #1: “Trashing” the Rules of Order Committee to make it a sub-committee of the Commission on General Conference. No discussion was brought up, so I’m guessing it will also pass. It’s a big change, but not really a very controversial one. It passed by 95%.
They split up Rule 7. This is because there are a few major changes later in the rule. But wait: Someone has moved an amendment. He wants the Committee on Correlation and Editorial Revision to study the feasibility of codifying the Book of Discipline. This amendment automatically goes to the Committee on Rules. We did vote on the rest of it successfully.
The rest of Section 7 is now before us; this has some significant changes. A young lady offered an amendment to add “youth” to a section that said only “young adult;” the Committee will easily accept that.
And someone just moved to delete the major change. The Committee has suggested adding retired Bishops and other non-delegates as parliamentarians. The Committee states that this will start in 2012, so the effects won’t be felt this General Conference either way. And now we’re debating on how the official legislation works and whether the addition was a separate motion. I’m not going to waste time typing out the specifics of the legislation (Robert’s Rules!). The motion to delete this was not passed, so we will almost certainly have parliamentarians in the legislative committees of 2012.
Yay! That rule passed. Only somewhere around 32 left to go.
And she skipped a rule…a young adult corrected her. Go, young people!
We’re voting with the electronic voting system…Benton mentioned that voting by hand for the rules would be much faster, and he’s right. I’m half tempted to suggest it…
Oh, such a sad life. Someone made a motion to add a rule disallowing specific slander against laity in legislation. It is a sad world we live in where the Church has to put that in its rules. It will most likely pass, but it’s just sad that we have to do it.
Ooh…someone has suggested that we vote on all of them at once. So here we go. Hopefully we won’t have too many crazy amendments. If that’s the case, we’ll be able to go through things fairly quickly. If not, this may take forever…
Yee-haw! The rules are done! Hallelujah!
And now we have random discussion and some more business, but we should be done fairly soon.
Ooh…fun fact! On April 23, 1968, the United Methodist Church was born in Dallas, TX. So this is a nice day to convene.
We have the Commission on General Conference reporting now, highlighting their petition to decrease the number of delegates in attendance.
Secretary of the Calendar is approved; a few petitions were passed to help the Committee on Reports.
And now someone is moving to petition the Judicial Council to declare the constitutionality of mandating membership to General Conference for specific classes of people. This would mean our “20% Under 30” stuff in possibly unconstitutional with our “no fewer than,” etc. I don’t think that the guy is against legislation at all, he just wants to make sure we’re legal and can get it in at this Conference. I’m honestly not sure if this will go forward…but we only need 20%...and…vote is good! We are referred. This should help the Conferences and General Administration Legislative Committees with how to deal with this legislation. Since a lot of the “20% Under 30” legislation came from young people very late at night who aren’t as well versed with the Discipline as those in the Judicial Council, I think this will help us to make our intentions happen more effectively.
Now we have a “Sensitivity Training” to remind us to be sensitive to our differences and each other. This includes clips from “The Office” to give some humor to our time.
We’re just about done…I’m gonna sign off for now. It’s been a good day!