Welcome to Gaia! ::

(i'm posting this in several guilds, so sorry for the deja vu xd )

Well... we know how many people feel about the original council and their "13 Principles", and apparently they are re-forming and getting ready to update. Thoughts on if this will go over any better than it did the first time, and does anyone think it would be worth it to try to participate (if nothing else as an effort to stop some of the misinformation from continuing to spread)?

Full article on the Wild Hunt blog - The Return of the American Council of Witches

(Reposted from MM - apologies to anyone reading it twice.)

I think this is pretty much like trying to piss up a rope.

One, witch doesn't equal pagan, and their choice to retain the title for their group encourages people to believe it does. Before they've said another thing they are still propagating misinformation, as the original Principles of Belief did.

Two, I do not think that Paganism has enough common ground to offer rules or guidelines. It would be better if they'd acknowledge or declare their are speaking on behalf of a particular variety of eclectic neo-pagan witchcraft, not all Pagan faiths or forms of witchcraft. Again, the misrepresentation that all Pagans are part of a single basic unified religion does not sit well with me.

Three: Opening this thing up to whomever applies to be a member is risky. If this is gonna be some sort of everyone's represented, 'democratic' thing, you can't discriminate. You can end up with people like Wade MacMorrigan sitting on the damn thing, trying to further their personal agendas - simply because they're pagan, and they will demand their pagan paths and perspectives are as valid as anyone else's, and the American way is to let all voices be heard.

Four: Oberon ******** Zell. UGH.

I don't foresee this coming to much of a consensus, except to pretty much piss off groups that aren't new-age-soft-poly-ENP witches. Being an American body, it's going to very strongly bear that American flavour and style to the paganism it represents. Sadly, this means it will still continue to misrepresent Wicca as something it is not, and it is unfortunately going to bear the marks of the North American entitlement complex in its' work.

I feel as if participating in this would only make it look more legitimate than it has any right to pretend to be. The first council was a massive act of hubris that I feel has no need to be revisited - trying to correct their efforts 30 years down the road is perhaps noble, but also sort of like tilting at windmills.

No random council of people anywhere has the right to define and make statements of belief or practice on behalf of all the rest of the people currently identifying under a very large umbrella term - especially if you're going to conflate two things that are really, properly, totally separate concepts. They either need to be more honest with how they identify their council and who exactly they are actually speaking for - or they need to just leave it be.

Near as what I could tell, it was some sort of scam from the beginning. They set up a donations page from the very beginning - for funds to make a website and what not, which anyone knows can be done for very cheap or even free easily enough. She originally had stated that she had received a request from the Army to update it's handbook, which was an outright lie. Not to mention her credentials seemed to be in question as well. So yeah, definitely fishy.