Sunday early afternoon update

I know you shouldn’t enjoy a hot, sticky, muggy city like Houston is, but I am having a blast down here. The locals are as friendly and wonderful as could be and the Lutherans from around the country are fantastic.

There is not much to report thus far in the day. Delegates are beginning the work of moving through their schedule. There were two motions made this morning that I thought I would update readers on.

The first was to change standing rules so as to preserve the spirit of the “pro-con” debate. In the rules, it says that delegate discussion of a given motion should alternate between arguments in favor and arguments in opposition.

The delegate noted how that doesn’t work when floor committees are responding to delegates since they are not neutral. That is, they’re usually responding in favor or opposition to a given motion.

So if you have a con question or statement, the committee might respond with a defense, and then you have a pro question or statement and the committee might respond with a further defense. So instead of a back and forth, you get a con-pro-pro-pro.

So now the rules were changed to have any defense from the committee treated as a pro-speech (and opposition from the committee as a con-speech).

The other motion was to amend the agenda to move up the presidential election to today. I had spoken with delegates from various districts who said that their District Presidents gave marching orders to their delegates to oppose any such measure (“The folks who made the agenda worked hard, we should respect the order,” etc.) Anyway, to make a long story short, some delegates came out HARD against it (including one guy who I have already heard speak about 10 times in two days — this could be a long convention!). The President sets the agenda and it’s printed up — it’s probably a bit of a long shot. And, in the end, “only” 48% voted to amend the agenda (It’s actually probably a pretty high number to go against the agenda set by the current president). So the presidential election will be Tuesday.

Delegates are all doing well and excited about the days ahead. I’ll keep you posted in the days to come.

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