Marvin is right in saying that I did not have the control over AAWA that people ascribed to me at the time, and continue to ascribe to me now. As president I was mostly a figurehead, part of a three-member board of directors that was necessary for legal purposes. We made it clear from the inception of AAWA that there should be no heirarchy, and if I had thrown my weight around claiming authority as president this would not have been well received. If anyone thinks, for example, that the wonderful Barbara Anderson would take orders from anyone, they are sorely mistaken! (I mean that in the nicest possible way, Barbara!)
If anything, at the time it felt very much as though it was my colleagues who were controlling me. I was even effectively banned from posting on this forum when the crisis broke. I broke this ban when I interjected on the thread where SST revealed his outing (in an effort to find out details), and received no end of grief from some of my fellow board members for doing so.
Part of the problem during the three week delay in getting the group closed down was the lack of information on both sides. Some of those calling for the group to be closed were doing so on the basis that it wasn't a secret group, or wasn't secret when it was first set up. This assumption was false, since the group had always been secret. And whether the group was secret or not carried huge implications as to how easy or difficult it was for outsiders to see what was going on inside the group.
As the crisis deepened I sought assurances that, not only was the group secret, but it was impossible for outsiders to get in and identify who was inside it. The person responsible for setting up the group assured me that this was the case. However, once we discovered clear evidence that, despite the secret setting, people could apparently somehow join the group at will without administrator approval, things moved much more quickly and I and others demanded that the group be closed.
I am not trying to excuse myself. People are asking for information and I feel compelled to give it, even though it seems the more information I give the more this is used as ammunition for personal attacks that I am being defensive. If I just apologise without giving information, this is also deemed insufficient. I am stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place.
Whatever the circumstances surrounding the setting up of the group, and my lack of personal responsibility for "outing" individuals (which rebel8 and now finally Zed have been gracious enough to acknowledge) the fact remains that I was still president at the time and therefore the buck stopped with me. I especially now regret and thus apologise for not making more of an effort early on to get the group closed down the moment concerns were raised. The fact that I had been led to believe that the group was safe was the reason why I acted so slowly on this score, but nevertheless I apologise for not acting on intuition and doing more.
As to those calling for me to be "outed" in recompense, such "eye for an eye" logic would be more obviously applicable if it had been me who was directly and personally responsible for the outing of individuals on facebook (which I wasn't), or if the closing of the group was solely my decision to make (which it wasn't). The punishment of which I am deemed deserving would also make more sense if I was the only one who would suffer because of it. In fact, if I were the only one to suffer the grief and aggravation of being outed I would have outed myself a long time ago. But without going into details, I can assure you that many around me would suffer if I was outed at this precise moment, including in a life-threatening health-related way, who had absolutely no involvement in (or knowledge of) this series of events whatsoever.
That being said, of course I recognise that, just as my outing would be unfair, so was the outing of those who were outed from this debacle deeply unfair, damaging and unforeseen, and likely in most cases also affected multiple persons. For this I can only apologise again and again and again if necessary. But I'm not sure how productive it is to rake over and over this continually, seemingly in efforts to find some new angle that simply isn't there, or make me suffer some punishment that will somehow undo the damage that was done, when that's clearly not how it works.
Cedars
