Some clergy aim to stop Bush library

Jean Torkelson, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, January 19, 2007

The "Stop the Bush library" movement at Southern Methodist University has reached clergy alumni in Colorado.

"I certainly would be disappointed if the Bush library was at SMU," said the Rev. Bill Kirton, pastor of Cameron United Methodist Church in Denver and a 1966 SMU alumnus. He signed a petition that was launched Thursday by a group of SMU alumni, including about 18 bishops, clergy and laity.

The petition urges the university to break off talks to house a Bush library and policy center because of anger over the Iraq war and the administration's stands on social justice issues. Bush didn't attend SMU - he's a Yale graduate - but he served two terms as the governor of Texas in the 1990s.

The petition can be found at -protectsmu.org.

"As United Methodists, we believe that the linking of his presidency with a university bearing the Methodist name is utterly inappropriate," the petition says.

For Kirton, a 1966 graduate of SMU's Perkins School of Theology, the Bush library comes from the university's understandable desire to acquire prestige and money.

"But that disregards the question of whether they want the school associated with what appears to be an administration lacking in all the social ethics that the Methodist tradition has generally stood for throughout the decades," Kirton said.

Supporters say a presidential library brings cachet to a university and is an appropriate way to reflect a diversity of views on campus. SMU president R. Gerald Turner calls the plans for a Bush center "a tremendous resource for the study of presidential decision-making in the post- 9/11 era." The library update can be found at www.smu.edu.

The Web site says SMU agreed in December to continue talks with the Bush library committee for the privately funded complex.

Meanwhile, the "stop the library" movement is still so new that many are withholding judgment on it. One is David Trickett, the president of Iliff School of Theology. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from SMU in 1982.

"If the proposal allows for a free flow of dialogue and a point-counterpoint, that seems to be appropriate in a university setting," Trickett said Thursday. "If it was used as a political tool, that would not be."

The key would be "openness to scholarly research and public visitation," Trickett said.

The Rev. Harvey Martz, who graduated in 1969 from SMU's theology school, said he wanted to study the petition before deciding whether to support it.

He said he found the idea of a policy center, or think tank, more controversial than a presidential library.

"It gives me more discomfort because of the pretty strong right- wing policies I fear it would advocate for," said Martz, the pastor of St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Littleton.

In a later e-mail, Martz said he was struck by the irony that in 2003, the United Methodist Council of Bishops adopted a resolution urging the president not to attack Iraq, "and the president refused to meet with them. Now the church, through SMU, is attempting to affiliate with Bush's library and policy institute."