An unfortunate set of circumstances resulted in the Crystal Coast Tea Party having Terry Jones as a speaker at tonight’s meeting. Rather than cancelling the meeting as some had suggested, Bob and I decided that we would go ahead and host Terry Jones in an attempt to convince him to withdraw from the Presidential race. Bob began the meeting by detailing why Jones was not a viable candidate (some which are described below in the Press Release). Jones responded by saying that he was invited to explain why he was running for President not the hear why he shouldn’t. There were a number of pointed questions from the floor asking how his splitting the conservative vote was helpful to defeating President Obama. The meeting abruptly ended with Jones leaving.
We have submitted the Press Release below to the Carteret News Times, and asked them to please give it as much visibility as they did Sunday’s story on Jones that contained misinformation since the writer had not contacted anyone from Crystal Coast Tea Party to verify the information in the article. We are particularly concerned about the impact this situation has had on Cox’s Family Restaurant as they had nothing to do with this except to provide us a meeting place. They didn’t know anything about a speaker, and certainly had nothing to do with the arrangements. They have experienced very negative reactions from a small group of people.
At our next meeting, we will be discussing procedures to insure that guests are not invited to speak by individual members without being vetted by CCTPP board members and members in attendance at the meeting. We are committed to not repeating a situation such as this in the future.
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PRESS RELEASE
July 31, 2012
The Crystal Coast Tea Party accepted a request to speak from the controversial Dr. Terry Jones who is running for President of the United States as a write-in candidate. As a non-partisan group, it has been our policy to provide the opportunity to political candidates of all parties to speak. By listening to and asking questions of candidates, we believe that we can thoroughly vet candidates to determine whether they believe in our principles of Limited Government, Fiscal Responsibility, and Free Markets.
After hearing Dr. Jones speak, it is clear that he does not subscribe to our principles, or our values as Americans. We believe that Dr. Jones effort to run as a third party candidate will be detrimental to the election of a conservative candidate in the upcoming Presidential election. We further believe that Dr. Jones’ anti-Muslim campaign is directly responsible for the deaths of US soldiers and NATO forces in Afghanistan as well as numerous Afghan civilians and soldiers. The Crystal Coast Tea Party considers Dr. Jones a totally unacceptable candidate for any political office.
The Crystal Coast Tea Party advised Dr. Jones to withdraw from the 2012 presidential campaign.
Additional Information:
The Crystal Coast Tea Party did not invite Dr. Terry Jones to speak to our group. Neither the CCTPP Executive Committee nor the membership at large contacted Dr. Jones. It is possible that an individual made an initial contact. However, Dr. Jones published an announcement in a local paper that he would be speaking to our group. The Crystal Coast Tea Party did not promote or advertise Dr. Jones‘ appearance, nor did we pay for any promotion or advertising related to his appearance. Any advertising that was done was apparently paid for by Dr. Jones without the review or approval of the Crystal Coast Tea Party. We chose to permit Dr. Jones to speak based on the policy stated above.
No one from the Crystal Coast Tea Party was interviewed by any media regarding Dr. Jones’ appearance, or the details leading up to his appearance.