Gary Randall and Larry Stickney’s Protect Marriage Washington (PMA), which appears to be succeeding in a signature drive to get Referendum 71 on the ballot (and give voters a chance to approve or repeal the state’s domestic partnership laws), says having to disclose the names of its financial supporters would subject them to threats of violence. Too bad!, says the state’s Public Disclosure Commission, which pointed the group to a little thing called campaign finance laws, which require the group to name names. Looks like WhoSigned.org has some publishing to do!
In the meantime, Washington’s marriage equality supporters aren’t standing by while PMA’s signature drive continues. Washington Families Standing Together (WAFST) yesterday sued Secretary of State Sam Reed in superior court to keep Referendum 71 off the November ballot. It’s not that WAFST doesn’t want to give voters a chance to up or down the law, you see, but rather it claims Reed’s office is approving invalid signatures from PMA: “We respect the referendum process and the public’s right to vote, but we have been increasingly concerned that, along with other issues our observers have noted with signatures being accepted that in the view of observers should have been rejected, the Secretary of State has accepted thousands of signatures that were not in compliance with State laws related to fraud in the signature-gathering process. Because of the limited number of signatures turned in, failure to enforce these laws could well lead to a measure being qualified for the ballot that should not be, and that measure has the potential to strip away important protections from thousands of families all across the state.”
Fighting the man with bureaucracy!
geoff
If you’re going to try to help discrimination, you deserve every bad thing coming to you. While I would never condone violence, I think everyone should be able to know what horrible bigots supporters of the PMA are, and that they should be shunned from society.
emb
What I love about the requirement that the names of financial supporters (and petition signers, for that matter) be made public is that it just helps let us know what our friends and neighbors and colleagues really think. And the privacy argument holds no water here: Signing a petition or making a financial donation to a political cause is a public statement and not — as the suddenly shy petition-signers claim — similar to a secret ballot. If all the signers of hateful petitions and donators to vile causes knew their names would be known to their neighbors, they might actually think about the issues before they made their support public.
Jesus Christ
I paid for it.
Lurleen
Something revealed in the hearing was that neither Larry Stickney nor the Hartwells had donated to Protect Marriage Washington. So whatever rude emails they may have received could not have been related to them being in the donor database, which has been public since June. They also couldn’t give any examples of donors who had faced violence or harassment. Pretty poor performance.
Washington Families Standing Together (WAFST.org) is working hard to preserve the domestic partnership law. Donate so they can continue! Sign up for a phone bank shift! Write a letter to the editor! Ask your employer or organization to join or endorse the WAFST coalition. And remember, Ref. 71 voters will be asked to accept or reject the domestic partnership law. Vote ACCEPT on Ref 71 to preserve the domestic partnership law.
Rick
I love confronting people about this type of shit.
Sunshine is a great disinfectant when it comes to bigotry!
AlwaysGay
VOTE YES on Referendum 71. Gay couples deserve the exact rights heterosexual couples have.
Do everything you can to encourage Washington voters to vote YES on R-71. As Lurleen mentioned donate, get your employer to endorse WAFST, work the phonebank WAFST has, write to Washington newspapers etc.
schlukitz
In a truly democratic judicial system, it is only fair that the accused should get to see their accusers.
Why should this issue be any different.
After all, they are our accusers, are they not?
You know, the ones who say our relationships are liken to incest, pedophilia and bestiality; that we are “infiltrating” federal, state and local governments, as well as promoting homosexuality in the classrooms of our schools; that what we do is worse than terrorism and will bring on the destruction of not only the family, but the nation as well.
Oh, I almost forgot. We also are the cause of hurricanes, avalanches, typhoons, mudslides, tornadoes, locust plagues, global warming and other natural disasters as well as inflicting AIDS and other horrid diseases on the world.
Of course they do not want us to know who they are. They might have some “splainin'” to do.