Ryan Marvin's great "A Mensan's Bill of Rights" in the June 2004 Going Forward hit several excellent licks, and I couldn't agree more with what he said. Yet, while I commend his accuracy in spotlighting internal offenses against Mensanhood, I think he missed a few worldlier, more fundamental points.

In his first paragraph Ryan called "ordinary" Mensans (i.e., anyone not elected or appointed to the American Mensa Committee [AMC]) "paying passengers on a locomotive" with an undesirable destination and snotty porters. In reality, I think, we're not even baggage: We're simply the (paying) fuel now. We mere lumps of coal might hope someday to become diamonds of the first water — but who cares what supplies want?

I once abjured in InterLoc the übergovernance that Ryan's rhetorical "declaration by we the people" implies. In the following issue the Chair proved my point by publicly, personally excoriating me for daring to make it (and AMC officers' input to InterLoc has to be printed). Clearly, Ryan's elegant analogies — both of the runaway train and of our "citizenry's" need for a Bill of Rights — are all too accurate. If we're going to stop the train, his proposed Bill of Rights must contain the Mensa equivalent of the First and Second Amendments.

We owe it to the promise of Mensa to remind elected office-holders — forcibly, if necessary — that, while we're here specifically to enjoy and celebrate our unique birthright, we relinquished none of the rights an ordinary citizen enjoys when we joined. Last I heard, we were not imprisoned felons; therefore, no "warden" has the right to cancel our newspaper subscriptions or censor our mail. Personally, this free, adult and independent American Mensan will not let paying for membership — in what's supposed to be a high-IQ society, of all things! — restrict my right either to speak freely or to defend myself or the society. Well, neither will you, probably, if you're still reading this.

Thus, I humbly suggest that the First and the Second Amendments be represented by their own Article in any Mensan's Bill of Rights, to wit:

All Mensans pay equally for the press, so our cogent explanations of why we stay in or why we refuse to renew deserve equal treatment therein. One distinct difference between our official organ and that of British Mensa is that only the faintest, most superficial complaints about American Mensa ever appear in the Letters column of the Bulletin — that's been officially labeled "Mensa-bashing" over here. Further, too many members' complaints about that censorship have themselves been censored out of the publication they helped fund. Exceptions to this rule occur solely in local group and SIG newsletters — the latest "land of the free (tongue)" on which the AMC is visibly encroaching.

Forced annexation is already complete among appointees — oops, "approved volunteers" — to AMC and its subcommittees. Seconding of appointments is done routinely, with little regard for what the "customary seconder" really wants. Members whose views differ from the Chairman's or subcommittee head's are either overridden or ignored; if such members refuse to shut up they're dropped, especially from any subcommittee where their views might be listened to, at the first opportunity. An RVC tries to fire local group newsletter editors for calling him on his high-handedness; an ExComm limits what an editor can print by setting an unnecessarily stingy budget. Altogether, this amounts to an executive decision to cultivate and nourish GroupThink; ergo, you won't see evidence of it printed in official reports. Shades of MiniTrue …

Likewise, we're constantly invited to share with other Ms in print why we like, enjoy and keep paying to belong to Mensa. But how long has it been since you've seen in official print one single member's reasoned decision not to renew? I never have, and I've belonged for five years. Given all the lip service AMC pays to "determining how we could increase retention," this desuetude of our dues tells us that AMC either doesn't know what it wants or doesn't want us to know what we don't want. Simple justice decrees that any member who resigns in disgust or protest has paid for the same right to say why as the member who renews in apparent rapture. They're equally Mensan; their reasons for staying in or for getting out deserve equal respect in print.

I recently learned that a member did once enumerate in the Bulletin, at length, his reasons for not renewing. He was eloquent, he was disgusted, and his contempt and disappointment were all too clear. But did Mensa listen to what this non-renewing genius said? No; nobody said a word about it; we just ignored Isaac Asimov and let him walk away — and then we had the gall to publish his photo on the Bulletin cover recently, for all the world as if he had died a happy member. And since that infamous letter, I understand, nothing even similar has been published in the national Mensa press. But even alarmed and despairing voices must be allowed to speak, and we must be allowed to hear them. So I suggest that members tell AMC to quit ignoring a troubling fact — that smart, articulate, active members do resign from Mensa for good reasons — and that we ensure that AMC bend over backward to prevent such members' official gagging. And we must make that happen soon: AMC is increasingly limiting what members can say in sanctioned print.

I suspect that most such resignations, as in Dr. Asimov's case, have to do with strife rooted in conflicting visions of Mensa. Are we a society of deep thinkers, or should we be? Are we building a U.S. political bureaucracy in stuffy miniature? Or are we cherishing a joyously protean, endearingly irregular association of like spirits and free minds? If my suspicion proves true, then it's clearly imperative that we ask the membership to decide, once and for all, exactly what we are — and stick with that identity. As things stand, we tell potential members we are free and then set arbitrary and unnecessary boundaries on that freedom: You couldn't ask for a surer guarantee of dissatisfaction.

At the moment, an official thumb is firmly planted on the Bulletin, in the form of a non-Mensan (though undeniably credentialed) staff editor — with an AMC-aligned family of "assistants" firmly embedded. And too many spurious "proofreaders" have arrogated the power to change, weaken, dumb down and dull what's in InterLoc — which, from the looks of the July issue, has apparently been turned into a Leadership Development Workshop (read "lectures transmitting approved techniques for encouraging political ambition and bureaucracy in print."). Using this commandeered control, the AMC truly railroads us. It ensures that "ordinary members" stay ignorant of many aspects of Mensa it would rather we didn't see — or see changing.

Our nation has paid dearly to ensure that citizens keep our rights. Alert Americans protest the least effort by our government to abridge those rights — courtesy of the First Amendment. But, while an American Mensan's tongue and pen are favorites among the arms he or she has every legal right to keep and bear, their use in and for Mensa is increasingly abrogated. I think it's past time to take back the freedom — and the "ordinary member" (read "not AMC") steering and editing — of our Press, before it's too late to preserve the right of Mensa to defend itself. We'll know we've succeeded when we no longer need a Going Forward.

— Angie Richardson