dfreybur
Premium Member
It is a landmark that each lodge that every lodge is responsible for its own administration. Yet if you ever have to have a trial in your own lodge who wants to have it run by brothers with zero experience at it? So rules about trials appear in codes and brothers with experience are called in. Both Masonic code books I've read so far have plenty of regulations about masonic trials.
Conflict with the landmarks come in if GL insists on a trial after the local lodge declines to hold one. Or where GL takes unilateral actions that override local lodge decisions about trial issues. An example of this is GL automatically expelling a brother convicted of a felony. Have you ever heard of a brother objecting to that rule? Yet it is in conflict with a landmark. I think of it as a procedural shorthand.
There have been examples of a MW GM out of control expelling brothers without trials or imposing a trial on a lodge to do so. Several years ago MW PGM Hass of West Virginia plus at least a DDGM were expelled by edict over some sort of technicality that really boiled down to his successor objecting to steps towards PHA recognition. In Nov 2012 the still current GM of Florida issued an edict of religious bigotry expelling brothers who are members of a specific list of small minority religions. It happens. Not often but that it happens is not acceptable.
Conflict with the landmarks come in if GL insists on a trial after the local lodge declines to hold one. Or where GL takes unilateral actions that override local lodge decisions about trial issues. An example of this is GL automatically expelling a brother convicted of a felony. Have you ever heard of a brother objecting to that rule? Yet it is in conflict with a landmark. I think of it as a procedural shorthand.
There have been examples of a MW GM out of control expelling brothers without trials or imposing a trial on a lodge to do so. Several years ago MW PGM Hass of West Virginia plus at least a DDGM were expelled by edict over some sort of technicality that really boiled down to his successor objecting to steps towards PHA recognition. In Nov 2012 the still current GM of Florida issued an edict of religious bigotry expelling brothers who are members of a specific list of small minority religions. It happens. Not often but that it happens is not acceptable.