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

[Caryn Ann Harlos]

Their legal rights are under a guardian and the guardian must sign or they
are not a sustaining member.

*In Liberty,*

* Personal Note:  I have what is commonly known as Asperger's Syndrome
(part of the autism spectrum).  This can affect inter-personal
communication skills in both personal and electronic arenas.  If anyone
found anything offensive or overly off-putting (or some other social faux
pas), please contact me privately and let me know. *



On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 2:31 PM Erin Adams <erin.adams at lp.org> wrote:

> There are beings who have received a gifted membership who can not sign of
> their own volition who may in fact be being counted in the formula that
> decides delegate allocation.
>
> Erin Adams Region 7 alt.
>
> On Dec 29, 2019 3:12 PM, Caryn Ann Harlos via Lnc-business <
> lnc-business at hq.lp.org> wrote:
>
> 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
> <
> http://maps.google.com/maps?q=710+Chickamauga+Cir+Tuscaloosa%2C+AL+35406+United+States>
>
> *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
> *Email Confirmation*
>
>
>    - I want to receive email communication from the Libertarian Party.
>
> --
>
> *In Liberty,*
>
> * Personal Note:  I have what is commonly known as Asperger's Syndrome
> (part of the autism spectrum).  This can affect inter-personal
> communication skills in both personal and electronic arenas.  If anyone
> found anything offensive or overly off-putting (or some other social faux
> pas), please contact me privately and let me know. *
>
>
>