History of the BRS Party –

Our founder and current Chairman Thomas J. Kelly had always planned to remain a Republican. From the time he first registered to vote in 1987 until he was elected to the Orange County Republican Executive Committee (OCREC) in 2000, he believed in the Republican Party's principles. However, after refusing to sign the Republican Party Loyalty Oath at OCREC's first meeting in December 2000, he was forced to fight for his First Amendment rights in court. Stunned that a state appellate court affirmed without any independent review that political parties are "private, voluntary associations", Mr. Kelly nevertheless pursued a similar case pending in federal court to fight the more encompassing Democratic Party Loyalty Oath whereupon the federal appellate court ruled that only members of a political party had standing to challenge an inner party rule.

Mr. Kelly had 90 days to appeal the federal appellate court's ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. Since the Defendant in the case, Thomas J. Kelly v. Katherine Harris, 331 F3d 817, (2003), was the Florida Secretary of State, Florida's chief election officer, Mr. Kelly decided to create his own political party with Jim Crow membership requirements and submit it to the Secretary of State's office for certification. Certainly the Secretary of State's office would deny such an application, which Mr. Kelly could then use to show the U.S. Supreme Court that the Florida Secretary of State as Defendant and the Florida Secretary of State as Chief Election Officer had two different views on the exclusive rights of party members to challenge an inner party rule.

The Secretary of State does in fact perform a legal review of party documents before certifying a political party and to Mr. Kelly's astonishment his political party was indeed certified. He even took the time to contact the Secretary of State's legal department and they told him they had indeed reviewed his membership requirements but the decision was made to certify the British Reformed Sectarian Party. Well, that's how we got our start.

As for the name of the party it was originally called the Black, Roney and Stapleton Party which were the last names of the three federal appellate jusstices in the Kelly v. Harris case. If the public started complaining about our party's membership requirements we would be able to say, "Hey, don't blame us, blame Black, Roney and Stapleton!!!" But since time was running out on the 90 day appeal window, our Chairman decided that the Secretary of State's office could avoid facing our membership requirements by objecting to our using the names of three individuals for our party name, so as a play on words the BRS initials were kept but re-named British Reformed Sectarian. But many words begin with B, R and S, so how did we choose them. Well the British are who we rebelled from and won our independence from, but soon thereafter we started taxing our own people against their consent and had to squash rebellions like Shay's and the Whiskey, so our Founding Father's desire to reform the British system, soon thereafter resulted in the same mess, so in 2003, we here in Florida started a sect mocking in some ways this ever elusive ideal of "political freedom".