<div dir='auto'><div>Forwarded as requested <br><div class="elided-text">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: Libertarian Party <web@lp.org><br>Date: Dec 29, 2019 3:48 PM<br>Subject: LNC Contact Form - Expulsion/denial of memberships redux<br>To: chair@lp.org,alex.merced@lp.org,treasurer@lp.org,secretary@lp.org,joe.bishop-henchman@lp.org,sam.goldstein@lp.org,alicia.mattson@lp.org,william.redpath@lp.org,joshua.smith@lp.org,richard.longstreth@lp.org,johnny.adams@lp.org,steven.nekhaila@lp.org,victoria.paige.lee@lp.org,elizabeth.vanhorn@lp.org,dustin.nanna@lp.org,jeffrey.hewitt@lp.org,kenneth.olsen@lp.org,james.lark@lp.org,susan.hogarth@lp.org,john.phillips@lp.org,phillip.anderson@lp.org,whitney.bilyeu@lp.org,erin.adams@lp.org,justin.odonnell@lp.org,pat.ford@lp.org<br>Cc: <br><br type="attribution"><blockquote style="margin:0 0 0 0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Contact LNC members:</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px">Contact all LNC members</font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Subject</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px">Expulsion/denial of memberships redux</font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Affiliate</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px">Alabama</font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Name</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px">paul frankel</font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Email</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><a href="mailto:secretary@lpalabama.org">secretary@lpalabama.org</a></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Phone</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px">(205) 534-1622</font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>State</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px">Alabama</font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Address</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px">710 Chickamauga Cir<br>Tuscaloosa, AL 35406<br>United States<br><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=710+Chickamauga+Cir+Tuscaloosa%2C+AL+35406+United+States">Map It</a></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Message</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px">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. <br>
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1) “"The Libertarian Party does have requirements to become a member. Most importantly:<br>
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• ARTICLE 4: MEMBERSHIP<br>
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.<br>
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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.””<br>
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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. <br>
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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. <br>
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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. <br>
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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. <br>
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2) “• (Roberts rules) Art. XIII. Legal Rights of Assemblies and Trial of Their Members.<br>
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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….”<br>
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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. <br>
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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.<br>
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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: <br>
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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." <br>
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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}<br>
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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:<br>
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In Georgia, trial evidence is a "public record."<br>
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A newspaper filed a request for the evidence in the case you mention -- a cell phone video.<br>
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A judge denied that request because of the content.<br>
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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.<br>
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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.<br>
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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)<br>
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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.<br>
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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?<br>
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For reference earlier I wrote:<br>
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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. <br>
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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. <br>
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A few things to consider:<br>
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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. <br>
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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. <br>
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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. <br>
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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. <br>
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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? <br>
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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. <br>
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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. <br>
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Paul Frankel <br>
205-534-1622 currently open for voice calls 6 am - 9 pm central, text any time<br>
secretary@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/) <br>
https://www.facebook.com/paulie.cannoli</font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><strong>Email Confirmation</strong></font>
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<font style="font-family:sans-serif;font-size:12px"><ul><li>I want to receive email communication from the Libertarian Party.</li></ul></font>
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