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[Jim Lane]

43. The suggestions of a lawsuit and a public stink may be ill-advised.

First, you can probably forget the First Amendment case. As you pointed out, the YMCA is privately owned. If a private health club wants to post a picture of Trump in the lobby and require all members to give the Nazi salute upon entering, that's not a First Amendment violation because there's no government action.

Other possible grounds for legal redress are: breach of contract (but the incident from five years ago cuts against you here, because the YMCA can argue that this ban on politics, at least your brand of politics, was an implicit term of the contract); any agreement the YMCA may have made with the local government, if it got a zoning variance or the like; and any applicable Wisconsin state law.

None of those seem all that promising to me. (This is just a gut reaction. I'm not licensed in Wisconsin and obviously don't know the particulars.)

What seems more likely to succeed is a bit of genteel blackmail. You and your state rep can refrain from going to the media -- for now. At the meeting, you point out that the YMCA has two choices: quietly re-admit you, or stick to its guns and get publicly lambasted. Your personal circumstances plus the involvement of an elected official make it likely that the story would get covered. The YMCA would come out looking very bad, even if the upshot is that its right to exclude you is upheld.

A key point of the blackmail strategy, however, is that once you go public, you have no more leverage. At that point the YMCA might decide that the best way to protect its public image is to stick to its guns. If, instead, you're re-admitted at that point, it looks as if the YMCA is admitting that it made a mistake.

When you push people, they push back. You're better off holding the publicity blast in reserve. There's a saying in chess, variously attributed to grandmasters Savielly Tartakower or Aron Nimzowitsch, that the threat is more powerful than its execution.

I do, however, agree with the posts that suggest pursuing the issue within the YMCA. Even if this yoyo Prince is quite willing to take the PR hit in order to get rid of you, his higher-ups in Stevens Point, and at the national organization if it has control over the local facilities, may have different priorities.

Good luck!