Originally posted by JoshNorton
That being said, I do trust the opinions of those who get appointed to the investigating committee of those candidates to do their due diligence.
That's good, but the investigating committee, as a matter of ethics, must be composed of people who do not know the petitioner. So if they don't know him, and his sponsors don't know him, then nobody can vouch for his character.
Typically, the only thing the investigating committee does is interview the petitioner and run the criminal background check. The weight usually lies upon the shoulders of the two sponsors who signed the petitioners, as they are the ones recommending him to be made a Mason.
Likewise any member is free to blackball during the balloting, and any member may vote against petitions for advancement, so there are lots of places in the process where mistakes can be remedied if someone does slip through.
That's true, but in most cases, nobody else in the Lodge knows him, and must trust the discretion of the two sponsors. If the sponsors don't know him, their trust is misplaced.
My lodge does not do background checks (in the legal and/or private investigator sense) on all candidates, and that has hurt us in the past... we had one guy who had a felony lie on his petition and we didn't find out for a couple of years. We booted him out with the full support of the Grand Lodge.
This will continue to happen in Freemasonry indefinitely until our Lodges begin taking the strict qualifications for membership seriously again. Hopefully by then it won't be too late. If Freemasonry is destroyed, it will not be by the hands of the anti-Masons like we see on this forum. It will be by Masons themselves.
