[Lnc-business] Fwd: LNC Contact Form - Expulsion/denial of memberships redux

[Caryn Ann Harlos]

Mr Frankel is spot on.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Libertarian Party <web at lp.org>
Date: Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 1:48 PM
Subject: LNC Contact Form - Expulsion/denial of memberships redux
To: <chair at lp.org>, <alex.merced at lp.org>, <treasurer at lp.org>, <
secretary at lp.org>, <joe.bishop-henchman at lp.org>, <sam.goldstein at lp.org>, <
alicia.mattson at lp.org>, <william.redpath at lp.org>, <joshua.smith at lp.org>, <
richard.longstreth at lp.org>, <johnny.adams at lp.org>, <steven.nekhaila at lp.org>,
<victoria.paige.lee at lp.org>, <elizabeth.vanhorn at lp.org>, <
dustin.nanna at lp.org>, <jeffrey.hewitt at lp.org>, <kenneth.olsen at lp.org>, <
james.lark at lp.org>, <susan.hogarth at lp.org>, <john.phillips at lp.org>, <
phillip.anderson at lp.org>, <whitney.bilyeu at lp.org>, <erin.adams at lp.org>, <
justin.odonnell at lp.org>, <pat.ford at lp.org>


*Contact LNC members:*
  Contact all LNC members
Your Information
*Subject*
  Expulsion/denial of memberships redux
*Affiliate*
  Alabama
*Name*
  paul frankel
*Email*
  secretary at lpalabama.org
*Phone*
  (205) 534-1622
*State*
  Alabama
*Address*
  710 Chickamauga Cir
<https://www.google.com/maps/search/710+Chickamauga+Cir+Tuscaloosa,+AL+35406+United+States?entry=gmail&source=g>
Tuscaloosa, AL 35406
<https://www.google.com/maps/search/710+Chickamauga+Cir+Tuscaloosa,+AL+35406+United+States?entry=gmail&source=g>
United States
<https://www.google.com/maps/search/710+Chickamauga+Cir+Tuscaloosa,+AL+35406+United+States?entry=gmail&source=g>
Map It
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*Message*
  Hello again LNC. My apologies for writing you all so frequently about
this but I’m not sure whether anyone else is going to raise these points
otherwise in your discussion or not. I’m again requesting a forward to the
public list.

1) “"The Libertarian Party does have requirements to become a member. Most
importantly:

• ARTICLE 4: MEMBERSHIP
1. Members of the Party shall be those persons who have certified in
writing that they oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or
social goals.

Regardless of anyone’s opinion, this person is in prison for violating the
individual rights of several people, and that is clearly a violation of the
certification. Until acquitted / found innocent, or until this person has
served time and offered something to the people whose rights he violated,
this is a fact and must be taken into consideration.””

Actions which constitute the initiation of force are not necessarily the
same thing as supporting the initiation of force **to achieve social and
political goals**. There are various ways the latter can be interpreted.
Taken in historical context, many have claimed that this was merely a cover
our butts statement to assure the government we were not planning to engage
in terrorism on behalf of our radical agenda of social change, and if any
LP member did, that we would have their membership pledge to prove that it
was not in line with what we are about as an organization. To keep this in
perspective the party was created in the early 1970s when there was a rash
of politically motivated domestic terrorism from the far left, much as
there now is from the far right.

Another plausible explanation is that it is a certification of opposition
to initiation of force as seen in libertarian philosophy to achieve social
and political goals, which would amount to an anarchist pledge or endless
debates over whether various minimal government proposals are somehow not
initiation of force. Although I’m an anarchist myself, I would not want a
pledge that excludes all non-anarchists from the party, Nor would I want
endless purge trials over whether any members have expressed support for
policies which initiate force to achieve social or political goals or not.
I hope we can all agree on that.

One thing the pledge does **not** say is “I will not engage in initiation
of force for any reason.” It’s an admirable standard and one I would aspire
to, but have fallen short of myself, regrettably. It does not even say “I
will not stand convicted in a court of law of criminal activity stemming
from actions which initiate force.” That’s a far different pledge than the
one we all took, and while it’s also an admirable standard, I’m also not
the only party member who has regrettably fallen short of this standard. If
we retroactively reinterpret the existing pledge as being that, and
enforceable (whereas to my knowledge it never was before) my expulsion
trial ought to be scheduled as well, along with an expensive audit of all
other memberships and who knows how many other such trials. All the more so
if we also have to investigate all potential new members as well.

However one interprets the membership pledge, there is no enforcement
mechanism in it, nor to my knowledge anywhere else in bylaws. The
historical and bylaws experts can correct me if I am wrong, but to my
knowledge we have NEVER had such a mechanism at the national level. I think
this is probably because people realized that having one could open a huge
can of worms. Such a process has existed and been used at the state level
in various states, to my knowledge only in a small handful of cases.
However, even those trials often prove to be very divisive and time
consuming, eating up much time and good will at the state and local level
and causing many other members to quit or scale back involvement regardless
of the outcome.

2) “• (Roberts rules) Art. XIII. Legal Rights of Assemblies and Trial of
Their Members.

72. The Right of a Deliberative Assembly to Punish its Members. A
deliberative assembly has the inherent right to make and enforce its own
laws and punish an offender, the extreme penalty, however, being expulsion
from its own body. When expelled, if the assembly is a permanent society,
it has the right, for its own protection….”


However, this does not say what happens if the matter is not addressed in
the bylaws of an organization (“its own laws”). Since our bylaws don’t have
an expulsion provision, I don’t see how this section creates one for us. It
just says we have the right to make and enforce such a bylaw, but we have
not done it. If something in Roberts creates a right to expel members, this
is not it.

3) Gift memberships: Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding
is that gift memberships are not valid unless the person being gifted signs
the membership pledge of their own free volition, and is a person capable
of informed consent, regardless of who pays the attending fee. Otherwise
it’s just a fundraising tool, but does not create a true membership.

As a reminder I also sent a second email which as far as I know was never
forwarded to the list, correcting a factual matter in my first email:



Thomas L. Knapp quoting my first letter: “As US Attorney, prior to LP
membership, Bob Barr prosecuted a teenage boy for having consensual sexual
activity with a teenage girl and privately videotaping it. As part of the
prosecution Mr. Barr's office made that video public, allowing unrelated
adults to watch the two underage children engaging in sexual activity."

TLK: My recollection is different -- or perhaps we're referring to
different events. {p: no, error is mine; I misremembered what I read Knapp
write about this, and he corrects it here p}

TLK: My recollection is that the incident happened after Barr left
Congress, when he no longer held public office, and possibly while he was
affiliated with the LP. And my recollection of the incident is this:

In Georgia, trial evidence is a "public record."

A newspaper filed a request for the evidence in the case you mention -- a
cell phone video.

A judge denied that request because of the content.

As an op-ed columnist, Barr held that the law required the release of the
evidence, and that if anyone didn't like that, they should get the law
changed.

Which, as a side note, made Barr, not Mary Ruwart, the 2008 presidential
candidate who was on public record as supporting government provision of
child pornography on demand.

But he was also right. "Don't like the rules, ain't gonna go by them" is
not a reasonable position for a judge, a bureaucrat, an office-holder -- or
a party's national committee. (TLK)

Paulie: OK I mangled that, will need to correct. But that brings up another
good point of consideration: Is merely *advocating* for the initiation of
force to serve political or social goals (or some specific types of force
involving teenagers, sex and or video) enough for the potential
revocations/denial of membership being considered? Or does it have to
involve personal actions? In other words, the way I remembered what you
wrote involved an actual action under color of law. This refreshing of my
memory makes clear it was mere advocacy in a newspaper column.

In the case that stirred the current brouhaha on the LNC, I am not aware
that the guy in prison who is trying to join the party is *advocating* for
making what he is convicted of legal. In fact I do not know what he thinks.
He may be sincerely sorry and have turned a new leaf, he may have been
railroaded, he may think he did nothing wrong, he may just believe he had
to do what he had to do due to economic reality. In another case someone
both practices and advocates routinely initiating force and normalizing it,
and obviously fits both criteria - action and advocacy. In the corrected
version, Barr engages in advocacy but to my knowledge no action, at least
none that I know of evidence for. How many of these qualify for membership
revocation under whatever standard people are proposing here?

For reference earlier I wrote:


As you may know, I read all your public emails, but try to write you
sparingly (otherwise you'd get more emails from me than you do from your
own current members, and if I was going to do that I should have run for a
new term on your committee; I was on as an alternate in 2012-4). I think
the membership purge/donation return issue is one that merits my input. I
hope you'll agree and share my thoughts with the public list.

Emotional cases make bad law, and those who sexually abuse, exploit and
videotape teenagers are certainly a very emotional case. The more
fundamental question however is whether LNC has *any* authority to refuse a
membership pledge and donation from *anyone* regardless of what
reprehensible things they may have done in the past or even do in the
present or future. One answer is that the bylaws give LNC no such power,
and thus it would be improper to refuse or refund a membership donation and
pledge from anyone no matter who they are. I understand that this is the
current ruling of the chair. The other answer I have seen is that Robert's
Rules say that in the absence of such a bylaw the governing body does have
the right to remove members for cause or refuse membership donations. I
don't remember the exact citation and I am not a parliamentarian so I'll
leave it to the parliamentarians among you to hash out, along with
ferreting out where in Roberts that is, since (I apologize) I do not
remember a specific cite, only being told that it's there.

A few things to consider:

1) if you do open the door to membership revocation, it could well
snowball. There have been many historic cases in other parties and
organizations where it started small with a tiny number of obvious cases
and then gradually grew to wide ranging membership purges that devastated
those respective organizations and crippled them over time.

2) But, it doesn't always have to. I am aware of a handful of state LPs
which have revoked a very small number of individual memberships over the
years, typically after some sort of internal judicial procedure, and as yet
I am not aware that they have devolved into massive membership purges of
the sort I would be concerned about.

3) It's also an undeniable fact that individual members who both advocate
and practice initiation of force in violation of their membership pledge
and tout their LP membership publicly can and have cause the party
embarrassment in traditional and social media and among our own actual and
potential membership as a result; most of the public does not understand
that we may not have the power to dissociate from members in the way they
assume any organization can.

4) This could potentially be an issue to take to the judicial committee.
But, as at least those of you who have been on the board since the start of
the term are aware, it's questionable whether we have one which was
impaneled in accordance with our bylaws right now. For those of you on
bylaws committee, please do something to fix the voting system which caused
this, even if it's just going back to the prior one.

5) If you do open the door to membership removal/rejection in this manner,
please consider what precedents you set. For example, do we want to
establish the principle that once someone has been convicted of a real
crime with victims they can't have a change of heart and honestly sign the
membership pledge, or that we should assume they don't mean it? What if
someone does mean it, but despite best intentions does in fact violate
their pledge -- but does not make it an ongoing pattern of behavior, nor
advocates for it as policy (I can be included in that)? If the grounds for
membership revocation include actions taken before the pledge is signed, do
they include cases where those actions were done under color of law, yet
amount to the same exact actions from our moral perspective? Example: As US
Attorney, prior to LP membership, Bob Barr prosecuted a teenage boy for
having consensual sexual activity with a teenage girl and privately
videotaping it. As part of the prosecution Mr. Barr's office made that
video public, allowing unrelated adults to watch the two underage children
engaging in sexual activity. His actions were legal, but should they have
been? Would setting this membership removal precedent open up grounds for
someone else to request a membership revocation for our past presidential
candidate and life member (if my memory serves correctly) on this basis?

6) It sounds like regardless of what you do this matter is likely to be
taken up by the national convention in May. That may be the best venue to
hash this out, especially in the absence of a universally recognized
judicial committee.

Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings, if you did. I hope they
are of some help to you in considering these matters.

Paul Frankel
205-534-1622 currently open for voice calls 6 am - 9 pm central, text any
time
secretary at lpalabama.org (not writing in my state party capacity but I hope
we'll see some of you at our state convention Feb 28-Mar 1 in Birmingham
https://lpalabama.org/event/2020-lp-alabama-state-convention-2020-02-28/)
https://www.facebook.com/paulie.cannoli
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