AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2009 > February > 13
Friday, February 13, 2009
Does the public have the right to know who financially supports voter initiatives?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
Andy has gone to the dark side of a dangerous liberal trend: freedom-of-speech protections for everyone except conservative religious believers. The point behind campaign disclosure was to check large donors’ influence on lawmakers’ votes. But democracy is at stake when small donors can no longer contribute without having private information posted on the Internet for the purpose of a coordinated hate campaign.
Andy clearly hasn’t grasped the threat level against Prop 8 supporters. Violent protests against Mormon and Catholic churches have been common. The L.A. local news covering 2,500 protesters caught on camera two Hispanic women being beaten simply for trying to remove hateful graffiti desecrating a church. Small $100 donors have received death threats, their homes have been vandalized, and their employers - who had nothing to do with their donation - threatened and harassed. It got so bad that liberal L.A. Times columnist Steve Levin — a gay marriage supporter — finally wrote a December column pleading for civility. As he reported a few days later, “I’ve never been called a bigot so many times.”
One statement from San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty — reported by Knight-Ridder — sums up why unprotected religious donors will be afraid from now on: “The time has come to take it out there to the people who voted for this awful thing…. The Mormon church has had to rely on our tolerance in the past, to be able to express their beliefs…This is a huge mistake for them. It looks like they’ve forgotten some lessons.”
Jim Bopp, lead attorney on the unsuccessful attempt to protect small donors’ identity, explained via phone that the Supreme Court has upheld such efforts — such as for the NAACP — when there was a “reasonable probability” that donors would be subject to “threats, harassment or reprisals.” If black civil rights donors were being threatened this way, Andy would be the first to want to protect them.
It’s terribly ironic that gay rights advances rest on the very freedoms being threatened by California’s angry agents of intolerance. As Bopp put it, “People can’t be fearful for taking part in our democracy. But they are being punished for taking part. If we allow this, then we are like a Third World country.”
Commentary
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady
Is there any way to know what you’re really dealing with on Election Day? Sure there is, as an up-and-coming football player famously said to his agent in “Jerry Maguire”: “Show me the money!”
Following the money trail is important in truly understanding a campaign, so I was gratified earlier this month when U.S. District Judge Morrison England upheld a 35-year old finance disclosure law that identifies all who contribute over $100 to a campaign.
This decision greatly displeased supporters of Proposition 8, the voter-approved measure that banned gay marriage in California. The attorneys for Prop 8 feared reprisals for supporters of this controversial measure, including retaliation towards donors to one of the major groups behind the anti gay-marriage initiative, ProtectMarriage.com.
ProtectMarriage.com folks fear harassment? That’s rich. They’re the same group that sent a certified letter to large donors of Equality California, noting their donations for the fight against Prop 8 and tersely suggesting that they “make a donation of a like amount to ProtectMarriage.com which will help us correct this error.” Refusing to donate, the letter continued, “would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage… . The names of any companies and organizations that choose not to donate…will be published.”
Threats of this sort have been regular fare for the anti-gay crowd: companies as disparate as Disney, Pepsi and Wal-Mart have faced very public boycotts for showing any tolerance toward gay groups. How then can conservative groups complain when their followers get similar treatment?
Of course physical threats are another matter entirely; fortunately, despite the hyperbole, there have been very few of those perpetrated against Prop 8 supporters. The plaintiffs in this recent case cite nine incidents of outright harassment, only one of those involving someone whose identity was revealed through campaign disclosure information.
No, most “retaliation” towards supporters of Prop 8 has simply come in the form of irate citizens who have taken their business elsewhere. The last time I checked, voting with your pocketbook played an intrinsic role in a free and just society.
So let’s celebrate transparency in government — at least until some Privacy in Campaign Funding measure crawls onto the next ballot. And when it does? I, for one, want to know who paid for it.