Theos-Talk Archives (September 1999 Message tl00055)

JRC wrote:

> Both of you have been on the list for awhile haven't you? You've heard all
> this before. Memberships revoked? Hell, Adyar has revoked Charters for
> entire nations (Canada, Denmark, they gave serious problems to Russia ...).

	National Sections. The individual members were still members (although
I think that revoking the charters was heavy-handed). Canada was a
strange case; it actually had TWO national sections.

> The American TS saw fit to *sue* the Boston Lodge - a massive fiasco ...
> destroyed it. Wound up costing *us*, the TS membership, somewhere around a
> half-million dollars in legal fees (yet these people will still say that
> their *critics* aren't behaving in a "brotherly" fashion!).

	Well, the old Boston Lodge went independent (the members who
participate here seem pretty Theosophical to me), and I believe is doing
OK. In the meantime, the Northeast Federation is attempting to revive a
TSA presence in MA.

> But don't worry,
> it'll never happen again. The Board, furious at the non-compliant, shoved
> through by-laws that pretty much gives them total control over any Lodge
> they want - including assets that the Lodges themselves have accumulated
> over the years. I could go on endlessly, but ... why?

	Not precisely as you say; reading the National By-Laws, there is
nothing there that prevents a Lodge from appealing dissolution in the
courts, and, the way I read it, it would be very difficult to get the
courts to agree unless there truly was a hostile takeover. The major
power of the lodges that was limited by the new bylaws was the ability
to transfer the assets of a Lodge to another organization.

> They got what they want. Total control. They will also be karmically
> responsible for what they do with it. And so far, what they've done is
> shrunk membership by fully a third.

	There is work being done to reverse this trend.

	Bart Lidofsky