Posted on 02/15/2002 6:50:19 AM PST by DoSomethingAboutIt
Libertarians in Santa Barbara, California have scored a victory for freedom of association by helping to nullify a resolution that censured the local Boy Scouts chapter.
On November 14, county supervisors approved a statute forbidding the government from discriminating against private organizations -- even if that group has "incorrect membership requirements," said Santa Barbara LP Secretary Robert Bakhaus.
"Even the U.S. Supreme Court had said the Boy Scouts have the right to associate, and make their own internal rules as they choose," he said. "If LPers could not lead in such a case as local government censuring the Boy Scouts, who would?"
The new statute invalidated a resolution adopted in March by a 3-2 vote, which censured the Boy Scouts for refusing to allow gay men to serve as scoutmasters.
County commissioners said the Boy Scout's policy violated the country's anti-discrimination law. The censure would have allowed county officials to prevent Scouts from using local camp grounds, leasing property from the city, or passing out leaflets on school grounds.
However, the Boy Scouts of America said the gay lifestyle violated the organization's oath, which requires members to be "morally straight." It won a U.S Supreme court decision in June 2000, which affirmed its right to decide who could be a Boy Scout.
Bakhaus said Libertarians support the right of the Boy Scouts to set their own membership requirements without government interference -- even if some Libertarians personally oppose those requirements.
"Even bigots have rights," he said. "Private organizations [should have] the right to make their own membership and leadership rules."
After the commission passed its resolution in March, "libertarian sympathizer" Michael Warnken and local LP members collected 20,000 signatures to put an initiative on the ballot to overturn it.
Libertarians helped drum up publicity for the campaign by sending letters to the editors of local papers, appearing at meetings and rallies, and speaking out on local television shows, said Bakhaus.
A number of conservative Republicans also joined the effort, which shows that small organizations "can't afford to be shy about having allies," he said.
"[Our LP affiliate is] too small to abolish taxation or achieve other radical reforms outright. We must first develop our clout by helping enforce the current good laws limiting government, while rallying better liberals and conservatives to uphold the best American traditions of freedom," he said.
However, the coalition ran into opposition from the county attorney's office, which filed a suit to stop the petitioning.
The attorney claimed the initiative language was "vague," and that only a statute or regulation -- not a resolution -- was subject to invalidation by initiative.
In response, activists changed the language of the measure meet state initiative requirements, and hired their own attorney to defend them from legal attacks, said Bakhaus.
With the initiative back on track and a large public turn-out at the commission's November meeting, county commissioners decided to nullify the anti-Boy Scout resolution, said Bakhaus.
"[It] was approved as law without a vote of the people, thanks in part to a large public showing -- but mostly by the fears of an electoral backlash if it went to a vote," he said.
Most importantly, Libertarians learned valuable lessons from the experience, said Bakhaus.
"The [Santa Barbara LP] learned that a countywide petition drive is not outside the bounds of doability," he said. "We also learned that a 1% investment ratio can be leveraged into victory, if that investment consists of extensive knowledge and experience about the intricacies of real politics."
I would like to see every drug agent, who participates in no-knock raids that are at wrong addresses or result in the death of someone or plant phoney evidence to wrongly convict someone, be in prison or on death row. Or BATFags, who also do knockdown raids and plant phoney evidence and kill people, be in the same places. Or Feebs, who participate in atrocities like Waco and Ruby Ridge, be in prison or on death row. Or ANY LEO who uses "asset seizure laws" to confiscate someone's property he or she covets be imprisoned. Or any politician who advocates ANY law not 100% in line with the Constitution, AND necessary, be subjected to exactly the same penalties as he or she proposes OTHERS be subjected to. Or Billy Jeff Clinton and Hil-liary be in prison just because they personally offend me with their smarmy, trailer-trash ways. However, I'll SETTLE for the eradication of these unjust, unconstitutional edicts and pardons for those wrongfully convicted under them. So you'll have to settle for the eviction, 'cause it ain't ever going to be a perfect world and there is NO RIGHT to not be offended by someone or something. You do what is rightful under the circumstances and swallow your ire at what, in a FREE society, you cannot properly do. Then you pray that YOU do not fall afoul of the deeds and covenants yourself. Because you know full well that you offend those around you (look at what you do HERE, case in point!!! ;-) ). So someone could be looking at you the same way you looked at your partying neighbor.
BTW, it appears you have issues with officers of the law. Timmy McVeigh didn't get help.
Whose rights are trumped? Daddy Gov ('our society) or the Boy Scouts?
You call yourself a conservative?
Say, I missed that part of the Constitution. Could you point out where that power is enumerated?
Thanks in advance!
Leftists and Libertarians fail to distinquish between race and sexual perversion.
Big surprise.
Private clubs aren't commerce.
Read Section 1. -- People are not to be deprived of Life, Liberty, or Property without due process.
Fiat declarations that a queer or an addict is a criminal is not due process.
Oh, so it's the 'Interstate Commerce Clause', is it?
False.
236 posted on 2/19/02 1:52 PM Pacific by Roscoe
Oh? Prove it. Otherwise you are full of barbra striesand. Where is it false? I am a Constitutionalist, once libertarian, and I would have it no other way. Nor would anyone I know or ever spoke with about it. A borderless world that lived under the same principles as set forth in the Constitution MIGHT be a good place to live. A borderless world under the heel of the UN would be hell on earth. So where am I wrong?
Due process is following the law.
Are county supervisors Congress?
Read the first post.
A master of conversational perversion speaks.
[and one is led to wonder of his obsession with sexual perversion]
The court admirably dispelled falsehoods regarding the actual meaning of the 14th Amendment.
Those reading the Engligh language with the meaning which it ordinarily conveys, those conversant with the political and legal history of the concept of due process, those sensitive to the relations of the States to the central government as well as the relation of some of the provisions of the Bill of Rights to the process of justice, would hardly recognize the Fourteenth Amendment as a cover for the various explicit provisions of the first eight Amendments. Some of these are enduring reflections of experience with human nature, while some express the restricted views of Eighteenth-Century England regarding the best methods for the ascertainment of facts. The notion that the Fourteenth Amendment was a covert way of imposing upon the States all the rules which it seemed important to Eighteenth Century statesmen to write into the Federal Amendments, was rejected by judges who were themselves witnesses of the process by which the Fourteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution.ADAMSON V. PEOPLE OF STATE OF CALIFORNIA , 332 U.S. 46 (1947)
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