Bump.
OOC: I'd discussed IA's above comment with him on Saturday night. We disagree on the fundamental issue at play and frankly, I do not think he is right on this issue. He believes that this is an issue founded in civil law. I raise the history of freedom of association law which has primarily dealt with criminal complaints and issues and indeed, states (in the broadest sense, both nation-states and subnational units in the American sense)
have criminalized membership in organizations even as they have abrogated the civil rights of those whose membership is in certain organizations!
(For further note on criminalization of membership in certain organizations See:
the Communist Control Act of 1954-which essentially criminalizes* membership in the Communist Party in the United States,
Communist Party USA v. Catherwood in which SCOTUS held that membership of the Communist Party was not enough to deny a business owner the tax privileges which other businesses were able to avail themselves of, and
Sections 84-86 of the German Criminal Code which explicitly gives to the state the power to ban an organization and to criminalize membership in a banned organization.
For further note on abrogation of civil rights, see
Section 841 of Title 50 of US Code-the Internal Security Act (1950) and
the following section of the same law as well as repealed notices and the US District Court of Arizona's findings in
Blawis v. Bolin (1973) in which the Court found that prior communist control statutes
did not grant the state of Arizona the right to abrogate an organization's ability to be on an election ballot and that that was indeed unconstitutional: "Eliminating the association for political purposes of an entire group of people is an action surpassing even that in Williams v. Rhodes, supra, where access to the ballot by an organization was merely proscribed by unconstitutional requirements.")
*Thanks to Tin for pointing this out, though I did discover this earlier myself. That statute has never been repealed, so theoretically, the US Government could still come after the Communist Party-even though it never has actually enforced those provisions.