HRC Lying About Membership?

According to Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Human Rights Campaign membership due totals don’t add up to the 650,000 members they say they have. Due to large donations and a minimum $35 annual membership due, he comes up with a maximum of 150,000 members. If HRC really had lied about their members, especially so massively, it would obviously be negative for the gay rights movement, as the right would inevitably pounce on it.

However, this is all with the assumption that $35 is actually a requirement for membership. University branches, for instance, might have lower requirements (the Ohio State University chapter happened to have a webpage and came up in a google search: students who attend a certain number of meetings aren’t required to pay anything), but still be counted in the total. Additionally, the HRC.org membership form has a space for partners/spouses, and they probably assume that the partners are supporters as well, which would mean that couples, despite paying only $35, would be fairly counted as two supporters. There are a number of ways to be an HRC member without having paid them 35 dollars. While it does seem odd to assume that so many members are student or otherwise non-full-paying members, it also seems unlikely that HRC would put a membership number so much larger than the real one.

All in all, I hope that HRC was being accurate, and I think it’s very likely that they were.

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