Slashdot Mirror
Legal War For WA State Sunshine Law
joeszilagyi writes "In a major battle in Washington State, anti-gay rights groups created and got R-71 on the 2009 election ballot. This is a public initiative to put same-sex civil unions up for public vote. The real legal war then erupted: activists created WhoSigned.org to take advantage of WA state's Public Records Act, and put the names of all people who publicly endorsed R-71 on a public, SEO-optimized website. Lawsuits quickly followed, and today it reached the United States Supreme Court, in a matter of months. The records appear to have always been public, but have only been available in digital form since 2006. An assault on civil rights, an assault on marriage, or an assault on sunshine laws and freedom of information?"
I think you have a ways to go though before intimidation or especially violenc gets called up for use. I don't think we've quite reached that level.
Personally I think I have great way to solve this problem; eliminate completely the concept of legal marriage. Its not needed, and the issue is causing us to waste time better spent on other work. Make it a purely religous or spiritial cermemony, that means nothing legally.
Personally I think I have great way to solve this problem; eliminate completely the concept of legal marriage. Its not needed, and the issue is causing us to waste time better spent on other work. Make it a purely religous or spiritial cermemony, that means nothing legally.
That would be the ideal, but that would defeat the reason gays want marriage in the first place. If all they were looking for was a symbolic ceremony of their life together, they'd just go down to their local Unitarian Universalist building and get married. They want marriage specifically for the legal protections: so they can force employers to provide health insurance, get estate rights when their partners die, tax breaks, etc. Of course, there's no reason why much of this couldn't be done on a contractual basis in the absence of legal marriage, but the state always finds a way to mess things up and make things difficult for people.
I'm sure that I will be modded down because it will perceived it as an anti-homosexual comment, but it's not. I believe in the equality before the law for all people, I simply don't think we should have the laws that make this a battle in the first place.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
In Missouri, federal funding was issued to the ADAP program (AIDS Drug Assistance Program) to provide life giving medicine to people who could otherwise not afford the $4000 a month in medicine bills. Various groups opposed to gays and people with AIDS (including the goobers who think it all a fake disease) would often times use sunshine laws to intimidate such people who received the benefits. Meetings were held to help determine the best way to help people with the meds money and often times, the recipients of the funds were invited to attend since the decisions made impacted their benefits, health, life etc... People with these groups would find out where the meetings were with sunshine law request and then come and photograph everyone there, write down their license plates, etc... They would then publish the information on the internet and in some cases local newspapers. This led to people losing their jobs (unfortunately, in Missouri, it's legal to fire someone based on pretty much anything.) The sunshine law was used for the harassment and intimidation of people. It eventually meant that people stopped coming to meetings. Some of them had families harassed and lost everything due to this harassment. The state now just unilaterally decides for people what they can and cant have. Often turning people away that are in dire need of this medicine to stay healthy. I do believe that sunshine laws have their place but there should be limits. Using them to harass people is wrong and it should be illegal.
Just because they don't want their names to be seen does not mean that they are ashamed.
Perhaps they're afraid of what might happen to them personally if their name is found.
For example, if a southerner had signed a petition favoring the right of black people to vote, they would damn well hope that it was anonymous. Not out of embarrassment, but out of personal safety.
Anonymity is the better option in these situations, since it provides an accurate count of how many people actually agree with the cause, not the number of people who will openly admit to it.