A ballot initiative that called for death to all gay people is officially dead, thanks to California Attorney General Kamala Harris. Is this the end, or could it return?
Back in March, attorney and anti-gay Christian activist Matt McLaughlin spent $200 to file a ballot initiative he called the Sodomite Suppression Act. Calling homosexual sex “buggery,” and “sodomy,” McLaughlin labeled it “a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha [sic].”
And so he asked the good people of the Golden State to enact a law requiring the state-sanctioned murder of all gay people.
“Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating-wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”
Finding the Sodomite Suppression Act both abhorrent and unconstitutional, Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris petitioned the State Supreme Court to try to void it.
Meanwhile, the radical Christian right was so scared the ballot initiative would set off a flurry of pro-LGBT sympathy, they did what they often do: they lied.
The American Family Association’s One News Now reported in April, “conservative legal experts are calling it a ‘publicity stunt’ that’s being used by the Left to dub pro-family advocates as ‘haters.'”Â
Of course, that’s false, especially since we know, thanks to Wonkette, that McLaughlin is the same person who in 2004 attempted to get the Bible in curriculum studies in public schools, an effort that would probably have been unconstitutional and cost the state about $200 million.
But now, Harris’ work has paid off.
Sacramento Superior Court Judge Raymond M. Cadei ruled on Monday that Sodomite Suppression Act is “patently unconstitutional on its face” and “any preparation and official issuance of a circulating title and summary for the act by the attorney general would be inappropriate, waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public and tend to mislead the electorate,” according to a report by the Bay Area Reporter today.
In other words, it’s dead.
Could it return in some form? Possibly. The judge’s ruling is specific to McLaughlin’s March filing only, but the chances of this coming back, especially since it would never pass, are pretty slim.
And coincidentally, the same day Judge Cadei ruled, Harris sent out this tweet:
Joe Jervis reports that “potentially on the 2016 California ballot is the Intolerant Jackass Act, which was green-lighted to begin collecting signatures earlier this month. The Intolerant Jackass Act was filed in response to McLaughlin’s measure and would require him to attend LGBT sensitivity training. McLaughlin has reportedly demanded an apology from the author of the Jackass Act. Seriously.”
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Image:17th Century firing squad re-enactment
Photo by cenz via Flickr and a CC license