June 2023
Discover more from Riverside County Liberty Letter
Hello Liberty Lovers of Riverside County!
In the News: Gun Rights in the Courts
The Supreme Court’s Bruen and Heller decisions were met with a tidal wave of inarticulate squealing by gun grabbers and freedom-opponents across the country. Happily, lower courts are now applying the logic of those decisions to recognize rights: not constitutional rights, but pre-existing rights. The fact is, the Constitution does not “grant” rights to anyone. It recognizes rights that everyone has by nature of being human. Conveniently, the Statement of Principles of the Libertarian Party encapsulates these pre-existing rights, making it easy for libertarians to defend rights for all.
It is therefore heartening to read the re-recognition of pre-existing rights coming out of the Third Circuit Court of Appeal in the Range case. This is a great decision, and worth reading. Some court decisions are dense and hard to grasp, but this one is clear and very insightful.
The fundamental points made by the court are summarized nicely here. Of particular note here is this idea: “a law passed in 1961—some 170 years after the Second Amendment’s ratification and nearly a century after the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification—falls well short of ‘longstanding’ for purposes of demarcating the scope of a constitutional right.” This is a welcome opinion from an en banc judge panel. In our over-lawed world our fundamental rights have in many places been buried under layers of legal “tweaks,” including both progressive “solutions” and conservative “defenses” (neither of which do either). At this point, we’re all theoretically committing three felonies a day. If everyone’s a felon, no one is, and using that status to strip someone of fundamental human rights is just wrong.
Kudos to the Third Circuit for recognizing this. This is not a precedent yet, but it is a great step in the right direction. Each of us is “the people,” and government should never be empowered to revoke that status.
State Party Discord Server
If you are a dues-paying Central Committee member of the Libertarian Party of California, there is a revamped communications channel you can join to be part of the insider conversation. The LPCA Discord server is ready for you to join!
Discord is an off-Facebook communications forum for productive and meaningful discussion to help grow the Party, and make it the vehicle for liberty it was always intended to be. Join and enjoy some general camaraderie, share liberty memes, get news of upcoming events, and otherwise engage with both the State officers and other members all over California.
Upon joining, you’ll be put in a new member channel awaiting verification. Once you’re verified as a current dues paying member, you’ll get access to the appropriate channels.
Find the server at this link: https://discord.gg/wfXzapGsTd
Party Membership
State chair Adrian Malagon has announced a "National Membership Challenge" for the month of June. He's hoping California can grow its national membership faster than any other state.
What is "national LP membership"? Are you a "national member"?
The national Libertarian Party defines a "sustaining member" as somebody who has signed the membership application statement and pays dues (currently a minimum of $25 per year) to the national organization. The number of national sustaining members in each state is used to allocate both delegate slots at national conventions and representation of the state parties on the Libertarian National Committee.
The higher the fraction of sustaining national members in California, the more delegates we can send to the upcoming presidential nominating convention. And as long as California accounts for at least 10% of the national total, we'll continue to qualify to have our own representative on the LNC. Other states’ memberships are growing, so we're currently a bit short of that, but the allocation for the next term will be made this October, so we still have time to qualify.
Note that while paying dues at the state level (California) or the county level (Riverside County) qualifies you as a voting member (aka "central committee member") at both the state and county levels, national membership is separate.
If you aren't a dues-paying member at all, you can join both as a national member and as a state/county member using a single online form:
Combined National/State/County Membership Form
If you are already a state/county member but not a national member, please consider adding national membership now. If you have any problems with the form, let us know at admin@rclp.us (or join the Discord server and ask the whole state party) and we’ll get you pointed in the right direction.
Join us in taking a stand for a world set free!
Help Choose the 2024 Convention Theme
The national Libertarian Party is running a Convention Theme Contest for the 2024 Libertarian National Convention. You can contribute to the success of the convention by selecting a theme that captures the spirit of the Libertarian Party and the Liberty movement and voting on it with your contribution. The theme with the highest contribution total at the end of the voting will win.
See the list of proposed themes here: https://my.lp.org/contribute/2024-libertarian-national-convention-theme-voting/
Suggested Reading This Month
How to Achieve True Liberty, by Joel Salatin. Salatin is everybody’s favorite “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” and here he shares some basic wisdom that any liberty-minded person should ponder and internalize.
For viewing, check out National chair Angela McArdle’s State of the Party address. She and Executive Director Lainie Huston lay out some big plans. There are some exciting things in the works!
Calendar Notes
As always, bookmark and check https://rclp.us for up-to-date event details.
12-15 July 2023: FreedomFest. This is one of the marquee events of the liberty movement, bringing together freedom-lovers of all sorts. This year it is in Memphis, and you can find details here.
29 July 2023: Quarterly Central Committee meeting and lunch, at Cactus Cantina in Riverside. Come have some lunch and celebrate liberty with libertarians! The meeting will include discussions of principles, and a report from Wendy and Jeff Hewitt about their trip to Freedom Fest. Come spend a couple of hours with people who share your values.
Closing Thoughts from the Chair
June has become a month of “they.” They want drag shows for kids. They want to turn America into The Handmaid’s Tale. They want to kill gays. They want everybody to BE gay. “They” want a lot of stuff, it seems like. What do all these contradictory accusations have in common? They all put responsibility for your outrage on a group of people. On a label.
Conveniently, you never really need to define individuals within that group. So June turns into everybody hating what “they” are doing or saying this month, with no real sense that there are real individuals involved. This is endemic in social/political discourse now. And it’s pointless, because it’s arguing about the symptoms of a problem instead of the real problem.
The real problem is this:
In a free society, it wouldn’t matter what “they” think about how to live life. However, the less free society gets the more it matters who thinks what, because whoever is in charge gets more and more ability to dictate life rules to everybody else. Believe what you like. Just don’t force it on your neighbors. FORCE is what people need to be focusing on, and guarding against.
Don’t believe me? You know what else happens in June? School lets out. Why were kids in school for eight or nine months? Because they were FORCED to be. School has been declared “good” and therefore has been made mandatory. How is that working out?
No matter how many people think an idea is good, forcing everyone else to pretend to agree leads inevitably to terrible outcomes. What fixes it? Stop trying to force people to live their lives your way. Whatever it is you think June ought to be about, don’t force it on everybody else.
You don’t need to force children to go to government schools. You just don’t. You don’t need to force other people’s children to listen to you talk about sex. You just don’t. You don’t need to force other people to live life your way. You just don’t. Making it illegal to disagree with you is always wrong. If a thing is good, people will see that it is good and do it, with no compulsion needed. That means, though, that you are going to need to convince people (real individual people, one by one) that your way is a good way, not compel “them” to agree no matter how they truly feel. It’s true for school. It’s true for everything. Especially in June.
I may think you’re weird. I may not understand you. I may not even want to understand you. But it’s not for me to make you live my way. Let’s all treat each other with that courtesy.
-Loren Dean
Find us on the web at https://rclp.us