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."
It has eliminated a great deal of such practices. What was once open and pervasive is now craven and limited.
Private property is private property. Government forceing ANYONE into your house is wrong. If that is racially insensitive, tough. Freedom does not = "warm and fuzzy".
(I hope Roscoe will not consider this correction as a racially motivated attack on Hispanics!!!) ;-)
Remove the government from the equation. You know I don't want your tax money to go for that, in fact you should keep your money in the first place. People could get married in a church, or however else they like, and sign a civil marriage contact if they desire. The only difference between this and what we have now is that the state would not be a party to the marriage contact, and would not dictate the terms of the contract. It has no business granting licenses for relationships anyway, because to be perfectly honest, who one dates or sleeps with is none of the state's business.
Second, it sets fourth a president that homosexual relationships are normal and moral.
That's the problem with having morality and law seen as one and the same. Please see post #203. By giving the state the power to sanction and license marriage in the first place, you've just given liberals that big stick I talked about earlier. Now the state is looking at you, holding that big stick, and it wants you to accept gay marriages. If you hadn't made marriage a state issue, and hadn't given the state the power to decide matters of morality, there would be no stick to begin with and you wouldn't have that problem.
I have no problem with states like Hawaii that wish to recognize it. I just won't live there, nor raise my children under such standards.
That's the practical answer to all these problems.
Second, it sets fourth a president that homosexual relationships are normal and moral.
Interesting.
Does the state have the power to take away his kids?
- 195 posted by tpaine
If charges were brought against him in a state that did not permit gay parents. - TA79 -
Your answer is yes. -- You ignore the 14th amendment. Such a prohibitive law would violate all three provisions of Section 1.
Any state has the power, under criminal law, to remove children from abusive parents. They must use constitutional due process to do so.
The state does not have the power to declare any people 'criminal' before they commit a crime.
'Gayness', is no more a crime than being cursed with an addictive personality.
If an addict abuses his children, jail him. -- Same with the queer.
Otherwise, keep your busybody states nose out of free mens affairs.
"Everything not prohibited is mandatory"
Sorry, but I had to say it.
Only in the context of having this borderless world use the Constitution of the UNITED STATES as a guideline. No libertarian OR Constitutionalist would EVER want a borderless world under the cognizance of something like the UN, for example. And you KNOW that, so your little diatribe is specious and full of barbra striesand.
Yes.
"...our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry..."
- Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in the State of Virginia
All attempts to delude the people, or to abuse their understanding by exercise of the pretended arts of witchcraft, conjuration, inchantment, or sorcery or by pretended prophecies, shall be punished by ducking and whipping at the discretion of a jury, not exceeding 15. stripes.
Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishments 1778Papers 2:492--504
If witchcraft isn't a religion what is it?
I challenge anyone to find a definition of religion that includes all major religions and excludes witchcraft, except by specifically excluding it by name. I don't think it can be done.
(No, I don't practice witchcraft.)
It's not the job of government or any political party of any stripe to see to it that Judeo-Christian morality is taught to the citizens. That is the job of God-fearing Christians who shouldn't be swearing any allegiance whatsoever to any earthly governments nor co-opting these governments to carry out their plans to Christianize the world.
If the society you live in isn't a society comprised of "highly moral, self-disciplined, God-fearing people", then it would seem that the Christians are failing at their task. It's not government's fault that society isn't Christian enough for you, it's solely and entirly the fault of the Christians.
Yeah, don't you just hate it when people act out of sheer principle?
Unfortunately, we have democratic 'majority rule' people, like you, in both political parties, who are ignoring the constitution.
That's why JR set up this forum, in fact. -- Yet day in, day out, some of you 'conservatives' fail to get the picture. A strange blindness, imo.
False.
Roscoe, I think I may have missed your erudition on this idea. Care to take a stab at it? CJ has avoided it like the plague, but an intellectual giant like yourself probably has a good answer for this dilemma.
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[Roscoe argues]
The equal rights, actually.
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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