I do think that if an event said they were going to have, say, the EDL leader, as a guest, then you could choose whether to attend or not. But if an event says it's going to be open, welcoming, and respectful, takes your membership money, and then invites someone like that EDL person, you have bought into the event, you have invested your holiday time, your travel budget, your hotel budget etc. as well as your membership money, and so if the convention then deviates strongly from what you thought you'd invested in, you have a say in it.

That's exactly my objection to the whole Ross/Hugos business. I had had enormous doubts about Loncon because previous Worldcons had been such a disaster from my perspective (concerns about sexual harassment) and because until - as a matter of fact - World Fantasy Con got stick for its feeble harassment policy, Worldcon had also been looking like it was going the same way. So I'd been talked into it on the strength of its "getting" that issue (by promoting its current policy, and by the fact someone I know well had been invited to draft it), and having Ross host the Hugos was the reverse of its "getting" what people were worried about.

I don't care if other people would have found him the big draw and not worried about that - for me, one of the key points about Loncon was whether it did or did not take harassment seriously, and for me getting Ross to host a keynote event at Loncon was as negative on that point as it might have been for a climate change activist to discover Clarkson was handing out the Green Energy Awards at some big do.