Sponsored by the Hudson Valley Chapter of the Older Women’s League, the American Association of University Women Poughkeepsie Branch, and the League of Women Voters of the Mid-Hudson Region, the forum was scheduled for April 9 at the library whose namesake launched Social Security 70 years ago. The Associated Press reported April 1 that the women’s groups received a letter from Koch stating that the law bars the use of federal facilities for partisan events and that the program lacked a speaker who could talk about the merits of President Bush’s proposed changes to Social Security.
Hinchey called the cancellation “the latest in a series of things by this administration attempting to control the information that gets out to the public. They just can’t face up to an open discussion on the facts, particularly on this issue.”
Older Women’s League organizer Jane Barber Smith said in the April 3 Poughkeepsie Journal that upstate Republican members of Congress had been invited to speak but declined. The event was relocated to the Friends Meeting House in Poughkeepsie.
When the cancellation raised a public outcry over freedom of speech, U.S. Archivist Allen Weinstein April 5 reinvited the groups to meet at the library, according to the April 6 Journal, but the organizers took a pass.
“We certainly regret that people have seen us as opponents of freedom of speech,” Koch said. “We are trying to encourage people to represent opposing points of view at the forum. We continue to encourage that.”
Posted April 8, 2005.