My name is Jennifer and if you are receiving this email it means that you
were a member of rpcman@california.com 's Freedom Ring on the day that I
left the ring.  Feel free to delete this message, but if you are
interested in personal freedom, freedom of thought, and tolerance, please
read on.

As a former Republican, now a Libertarian, I will be the first to say that
RPCman has every right to run the Freedom ring the way he wishes, and to
exclude whomever he wants - after all, it is his ring. However, I do have
a problem with the way he went about eliminating certain sites in the
ring.

When I joined the ring, there were certain criteria for joining - it was
simply "sites dealing with personal freedom." Also on the signup page was
the statement "Joining the ring does not imply that you agree with
everything on the other sites in the ring." This was certainly reasonable,
and I had no problem accepting these terms.

However, recently, he has changed these terms and DID NOT NOTIFY the ring.
He simply removed sites specifically presenting a pro-life viewpoint and
did not inform the owners of those sites that he was doing so, or why he
was removing them. This meant that the owners of these sites STILL had the
code there, effectively ADVERTISING the Freedom Ring while gaining NO
benefit from doing so. I feel that this action on RPCman's part was wrong
in the first place and cowardly in the second.

There are some wonderful sites on this ring, as well as some that I find
personally distasteful.  I also wonder at the logic that arrives at the
conclusion that a pro-life site is anti-freedom while a site advocating
gun-control is not. I had no trouble being a part of this ring including
the sites that I did not agree with simply because I DO fiercely believe
in personal freedom.  However I cannot be a part of a ring where the rules
change without notice, and where the decisions are made arbitrarily.

The Pro-Life viewpoint is not a "hot button" issue with me. Freedom is.
This is why I removed my site from this ring.

Thanks for your time!

Jen

--
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say
to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this
you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression,
no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control
a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force
can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not
fission bombs, not anything--you can't conquer a free man; the most you
can do is kill him.
 - Robert A. Heinlein

http://www.diac.com/~jencowan/