Roanoke Tea Party in roanoke.com
Chip Tarbutton, a member of our interim board, has a piece published in The Roanoke Times’ Round Table blog.
It is in response to an earlier posting criticizing our July 4 rally at Elmwood Park for preaching to the choir, with high profile speakers coming from the Republican Party, and also for comments about social issues like abortion being discussed from the stage.
Chip responds (in part):
At the July 4th rally, we invited every local representative and local political party to attend. This included Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians and Constitutional Party representatives. No Democrats chose to accept our invitation. About half of the scheduled speakers were from the Libertarian Party, the Constitutional Party or from other organizations (We had a Fair Tax representative and radio personality Brian Gottstein speak).
The second half of the agenda was open to anyone, although we ran into some time constraints and not as many people got a chance to speak as we would have liked. A few speakers toward the end did discuss social issues, but this was not a main focus of the rally, and they are not issues the Roanoke Tea Party is actively pursuing. We believe in freedom of speech, and speakers comments were completely theirs and theirs alone.
You can read Chip’s entire response here.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Share
