FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, April 4th, 2024
For further information, please contact:
gasbr-media-queries@sexbasedrights.org
Stein Campaign Confirms its Capture
by Gender Ideology and Sex Denialism
Intends to Seek Ballot Access
Independent of the Georgia Green Party,
Denying the GGP a Ballot Line due to
Georgia’s Support for Women’s Sex-Based Rights
In a statement released by the Georgia Green Party last week, the state party officers stated that, “ … the Stein campaign affirmed its intent to pursue an independent ballot placement for Stein in Georgia, a move that would preclude the Georgia Green Party from an opportunity to retain for future election cycles a ballot line which might be earned in this year’s election.” The Georgia party’s statement goes on to report that, “[c]iting conversations with the National Lavender (LGBTQ) Caucus of the Green Party of the United States, the Stein campaign misrepresented the Georgia party as ‘anti-trans,’ despite the party's unwavering commitment to human rights for all individuals.”
“In its rush to appease the Lavender Caucus, the Stein campaign’s refusal to collaborate with the Georgia Green Party demonstrates its willingness to undermine its own efforts to achieve ballot access. That refusal also harms the national party and the prospects for future Green candidates in Georgia,” said Rich Whitney, Treasurer for the Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights. “This submission to an authoritarian faction’s refusal to embrace the diversity of thought among Greens seems out of character for Dr. Stein. It violates the party’s own values and weakens our movement, benefitting the war machine and the corporate duopoly it funds. Stein’s campaign shows no such deference in its challenge to corporate and state powers; why then is it thwarting its own and the Green Party’s success by complying with autocratic demands?”
If the state party – rather than just the campaign – were to secure the ballot line in 2024 with the 7,500 valid signatures required for Presidential candidates, it would then be possible to retain that ballot line with a showing at the polls in November. That would make it possible for future candidates to avoid the expensive and arduous task of collecting the nearly 70,000 petition signatures from voters needed to gain ballot access for the state-wide Constitutional offices to be elected in 2026. This is exactly how the Libertarian Party of Georgia has successfully retained a ballot line for the past three decades, based on the support it demonstrates at the polls every two years.
In early March, the Stein campaign had published two emails to campaign lists speaking to its ballot access work in Georgia, and seeking to raise $10,000.00 to support a volunteer effort to comply with Georgia's ballot access requirements.
Justifying their decision to not work with the Georgia party on its ballot access campaign, Stein’s national campaign leadership then pointed, without elaboration, to provisions of the Georgia Green Party Platform endorsing the Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights as evidence.
The GGP platform amendment endorsing the Declaration explicitly committed the state party to protect women's spaces and sports, and to protect minors incapable of fully informed consent from experimental medical interventions being promoted as “gender affirming care.” Three years later, the Georgia General Assembly prohibited surgical interventions and the use of cross-sex hormones on children due to the harms they impose.
Multiple developments in early March brought renewed attention to pediatric gender medicine. The British National Health Service promulgated guidance prohibiting the use of puberty blockers on British children. An explosive WPATH Files report documented glaring lapses of medical ethics by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization which published the Standard of Care (SOC8) document designed to justify insurance coverage for the experimental protocols marketed directly to young self-diagnosing consumers as “gender medicine.”
After the Georgia party adopted the endorsement of the Declaration at its 2020 Bonaire Convention, the National Lavender Caucus brought a complaint before the national party's Accreditation Committee, seeking to revoke the accreditation of the Georgia Green Party. There was a two-year battle within the national party's National Committee and Accreditation Committee, spilling over into several other committees including the GPUS Diversity Committee.
The abuses of party rules and values endemic in the Lavender Caucus' campaign to demonize the Georgia party and secure its expulsion from the national party were documented in a twenty page Minority Report. Jeff Sutter, active thirty-some years with the Missouri and later the Indiana Green Parties, authored the report. He was soon driven out by a newly elected Indiana Party leadership captured by gender ideologists from the National Committee several months ahead of the completion of his two-year term and days before the Lavender Caucus resolution to expel the Georgia Green Party came to the floor of the National Committee for debate. He was thus denied the opportunity to publish the report to its intended audience. His report documented the suppression of debate by authoritarian tendencies in the leadership of the national party which misinterpreted the rules of the National Committee to allow the policing of speech and the silencing of dissenting voices.
As documented more fully in Mr. Sutter’s Minority Report, the Georgia party was denied an opportunity to be represented by counsel in hearings before the Accreditation Committee. Its members on that Committee were limited in the hearings to five minutes of questions each for the witnesses called. The Accreditation Committee refused to hear testimony from witnesses in defense of the Georgia party.
Nonetheless, the Georgia party published its defense pleadings and video depositions of its witnesses on a website operated by a Dialogue Not Expulsion (DnE) Caucus. The DnE was organized in defense of the Georgia Party by Greens across the nation who variously were motivated by their support for free speech, for the right to hold dissenting views, for a democratic Green Party, and/or for the gender critical views asserted in the Declaration for Women's Sex-Based Rights. The DnE site, now hosted by a Gender Critical Greens Political Action Committee, also archives the Georgia Party's early response to the Lavender Caucus campaign of misinformation. In that letter sent on behalf of the state committee, the Georgia party challenged the anti-democratic nature of the Lavender Caucus objections to a political party engaging in debate on matters of public policy.
Many activists engaged with the Dialogue Not Expulsion Caucus have gone on to organize as the Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights. GASBR operates as a dues-paying membership organization, bringing together current, resigned, and expelled Greens seeking to provide a place where politically-homeless activists who share the founding values of the Green Party might collaborate to build a new political formation free from the capture of gender ideology.
Among those resigning in the wake of the Georgia party being purged by the national party were current GASBR Treasurer Rich Whitney along with his partner, herself a three-time Green Party nominee for Congress. Whitney had won over 10% of the Illinois vote as a 2006 candidate for Governor.
As an attorney, Whitney represented the Georgia party on appeal of a ballot access challenge. On the initiative of six-term veteran of the US Congress, Cynthia McKinney, a Party member since 2004 and its 2008 Presidential nominee, the case was first filed on behalf of the Georgia state party in the 2012 election cycle. Whitney won the appeal in 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ordered the case remanded for a correct application of the law. The 7,500 signature threshold for ballot access, a rule applying to only Presidential candidates, is the result of the District Court's subsequent ruling. On remand, Laughlin McDonald, plaintiffs’ attorney representing the Georgia Green Party, won an order declaring Georgia's ballot access barriers unconstitutional. Among Georgia Green Party activists, the 1943 statute is known as "Georgia's Jim Crow ballot access regime", for the politics driving its enactment; and its ongoing impact limiting access to the ballot.
"There was so much promise and potential in the early days of the US Green Party. Today, it never misses an opportunity to shoot itself in the foot," remarked Whitney.
Last week’s statement by the Georgia Green Party included a report saying that, as the state party “prepares for an additional Nominating Convention on May 18th, these recent developments may prompt a reassessment of the party's support for the Stein campaign.”
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Resources:
Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights
https://www.womensdeclaration.com/en/
Report of the Minority of the Accreditation Committee
With respect to the Committee’s referral of the
Complaint of the National Lavender Green Caucus
Seeking the Revocation of Accreditation for the Georgia Green Party
https://www.dialoguenotexpulsion.org/sites/default/files/plead ings/nlc-vs-ggp/2021-07/Report_of_the_Minority_of_the_Accreditation_Committee_final.pdf
Defense of the Georgia Green Party
To the Complaint of the Lavender Caucus
https://www.dialoguenotexpulsion.org/nlc-vs-ggp/pleadings/Defense_Pleadings
Video Depositions of Defense Witnesses in the matter of
National Lavender Caucus v Georgia Green Party
https://www.dialoguenotexpulsion.org/nlc-vs-ggp/testimony
(one of our witnesses subsequently asked us to unpublish her testimony
when her organization came under attack seeking to defund their work)
Reply by Georgia Green Party to Dario Hunter
Proposing a Reconciliation Retreat
http://georgiagreenparty.org/reply_to_dario_hunter_invitation-final_signed/
https://www.dialoguenotexpulsion.org/documents/Georgia_Party_Responds_to_Invitation_from_Lavender_Caucus
WPATH Files Report
https://environmentalprogress.org/s/U_WPATH-Report-and-Files.pdf
https://www.newsnationnow.com/lgbtq/files-debate-transgender-health-authority/
Beyond WPATH
https://beyondwpath.org/
Transgender Research: Five Things Every Parent and Policy-Maker Should Know
https://institute-research.com/pdf/Transgender_Research--5_Questions_for_Parents_%26_Policymakers_%28IRE%209-26-22%29.pdf
The Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights
https://greenalliance.sexbasedrights.org/
The Gender Critical Greens Political Action Committee
https://pac.gendercriticalgreens.org
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