Philadelphia Club In Uproar Over Award Scheduled For DeSantis
The Union League of Philadelphia plans to present its highest honor to Ron DeSantis next Tuesday, despite protests from more than 100 members who want the event canceled. Via the Philadelphia Inquirer "Clout" newsletter:
DeSantis, a likely contender for the 2024 Republican nomination for president, will receive the club’s gold medal, an honor first awarded to President Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
Clout first told you about the controversy in September after obtaining a flurry of emails to then-club president Craig Mills from angry members, some threatening to resign unless the award was rescinded.
That movement in October grew into the Concerned Members of the Union League, 107 members who signed a five-page letter to Mills, saying the DeSantis event “poses outsized immediate and long-term reputational risk to the Union League” and “appears to confer an endorsement” for DeSantis’ presidential ambitions.
The reasons they cited in their letter:
The members claimed DeSantis “does not support the peaceful transfer of presidential power” and is “equivocal about an armed insurrection against the United States” on Jan. 6, 2021.
DeSantis, they also wrote, supports political candidates “who spread the lie” that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.”
And they said DeSantis has “trampled on the 1st Amendment” by supporting “the banning of books from libraries and schools and the restriction of what school teachers can say and teach.”