> So, forgive my asking this, Dennis, but have you ever ATTENDED a rally,
teach-
> in, public meeting, etc.?
More than a few, pal. I've attended and spoken, emceed and moderated. And the teach-ins, marches and rallies I was part of included some truly reprehensible characters, in my view. Yet, because they were ostensibly working toward the same objective, they were allowed to speak, leaflet, etc.
> As for public rallies, the 'public' part is that everyone is invited to
attend
> the rally. Everyone is not invited to speak at the rally. Committees of
> organizers haggle over the lists, making their decisions on the basis of
> considerations such as political line, national and gender
representativeness,
> media draw, speaking skill, name recognition, reputation, do they have a
> reputation of going over the time limit, and so on.
Right. And Lerner, like him or not, is a public antiwar figure well-known in the Bay Area. You aren't forced to invite him to speak, but to exclude him based on some wimpy "he criticized us" excuse is pretty sad and quite transparent. And again, if the three other rally sponsors decided, on strictly ideological grounds, to exclude anyone from ANSWER/IAC/WWP, I guarantee that you and your little red scouts would raise hell, and rightly so.
Not that the WWP hasn't crashed events they weren't invited to. Recall your prez candidate Monica Moorehead disrupting C-SPAN's Third Party debate back in '96, demanding to have a podium of her own. She soon left, sadly enough. I wanted her to make an ass of herself on national TV (she was just getting started), and had to settle for Howard Phillips.
DP