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SCOTUS Rules Petiton Signatures Are Public Record
Reader SheeEttin reminds us that back in October, the Supreme Court accepted a case testing whether or not petition signers' names could be kept anonymous. (The premise was that the act of signing a petition is covered by free speech, and thus signers are entitled to anonymity, especially to protect them from harassment.) Now the Court has issued its ruling: signatures are part of the public record. "By a strong majority Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a setback for opponents of gay marriage who wanted to keep their identities secret. The justices favored transparency over privacy in a case testing whether signing a petition is a public act. The case began with a bill that the Washington state legislature passed in 2009, expanding the state's domestic partnership law. The new referendum was known as 'everything but marriage' for the enhanced rights it gave same-sex couples. People who opposed the bill gathered 120,000 signatures for a ballot measure asking voters to repeal it. That measure eventually reached Washington voters, who upheld 'everything but marriage.' Those who signed the repeal petition feared that they would be harassed if their names became public, so they went to court challenging Washington's Public Records Act. They argued that signing a petition is speech that is protected from disclosure. But in Thursday's 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court disagreed. 'Such disclosure does not, as a general matter, violate the first amendment,' Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court."
Excuse my aside but I thought I would post an interesting fact that some people may or may not know. Now everyone knows that race has a correlation to penis size, but did you know that programming languages did to? Gary Niger, programming languages expert for Goatse Security, had this to say on the subject:
"Now we all know that the C programming language is renowned for it's small code size and fast execution speed, but did you know that C programmers are also well-known for having tiny penises and being premature ejaculators? According to our study C programmers average at about 3.5 inches long fully erect."
On the other hand, the World Organization on Penises (WOP) have found that programmers in C# and Java have been shown to have some of the biggest penises in the industry (lowest end measurements are around 7" inches long and 6" in circumference).
If this post has been insightful for you please mod it up. Also feel free to link this post on Digg, Reddit or other news aggregator sites. Thank you for your time.
I suspect this is modded funny and not insightful because there are some people around these parts that think the 1st amendment to the Constitution is hugely important and that people that might feel the same way about the 2nd amendment to the Constitution are "wacko."
And they have mod points...and they use them.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Whats disgusting is the way some people who signed the Prop 8 petition in CA were treated afterward - loosing jobs
What's disgusting is that spelling.