I think this is right:
The Supreme Court has turned away an appeal from same-sex marriage opponents in California who want to keep the identities of their campaign donors secret.
The justices on Monday let stand a lower court ruling against ProtectMarriage.com, the National Organization for Marriage and other supporters of a 2008 ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriages in California until the ban was overturned five years later.
The groups sought to conceal their past and future campaign finance records because they feared harassment of donors. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against them in part because the names have been publicly available for five years.
State law requires political committees to identify those who contribute more than $100 during or after a campaign, along with the donor’s address, occupation and employer.
You want to be a bigot, you get to be loud and proud about it and your neighbors get to know. You want to hide in the shadows and be a bigot, join the fucking Klan and don a white hood.
Mary G
I remember being very proud when I looked up donations in my neighborhood – only one person had given anything to Prop 8, and that was like $10. It was a bit surprising because there are plenty of wingnuts around.
c u n d gulag
Or, join the GOP, and learn to dog-whistle!
Joel Hanes
IIRC, much of the money opposing Prop 8 came from donors in Utah and N. Arizona
rikyrah
if you’re all big and bad, then be out in the open being big and bad
Couldn't Stand the Weather
Who the hell are these people on the Roberts Court, and what have they done with the reactionary, corporatist jackholes that have been on SCOTUS since waaay to far back to even kid about? These pod person justices actually sound REASONABLE on this issue.
What the fuck???
Off topic… the Kaplan Post does not disappoint regarding federal stupidity.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/02/dea-warns-of-stoned-rabbits-if-utah-passes-medical-marijuana/
patrick II
Donor disclosure is good for ye, but not for me. From SourceWatch:
Tommy
@Mary G: I think I gave $250 to a gay rights organization. I did that and don’t want it known. I just did it. I don’t need people looking up what I gave and too whom I gave!
brantl
The title of this should be Put your Face and Name where your Money Is, but that isn’t as catchy.
kindness
Who knew Jesus was so full of hate and spittle?
pacem appellant
Transparent funding seems like a no-brainer when it comes to democracy. Citizens need to be able to donate their time and money to their causes, and other citizens have the right to know about those activities (and vice versa). In that vein, where can I look up Prop 8 donators? I’m curious about one house in the hood that had a Yes on Prop 8 sign.
Couldn't Stand the Weather
Way too far back.
Can’t type for shit on this recent laptop (I want my old Pentium III 450 MHz Compaq back again! It only took three minutes to boot to Windows 2000, and it had a six GB hard drive and a CD-ROM from the late 1980s).
Amir Khalid
@Tommy:
To my knowledge, people around you already know you’re a liberal. They would probably not be surprised that you donated to a gay rights organisation. Why would you need it kept a secret?
jl
@c u n d gulag:
” Or, join the GOP, and learn to dog-whistle! ”
The increasingly oldster GOP base is getting hard of hearing at high frequencies and need air horns to understand.
Just noticed this at TPM blog:
Male Fox Host Complains About The ‘Pussification’ Of Men (VIDEO)
TPM
Discussing the harsh language that Vanderbilt University basketball coach Kevin Stallings hurled at a rival player last week, [Fox Business host] Gasparino said, “I think what he did to that kid is completely appropriate.”
“The bigger story here is the wimpification of men that’s going on in this country,” he added.
“Wimpification!” repeated co-host Harris Faulkner, impressed.
“I would’ve said something else,” Gasparino replied.
“You can say whatever you want, it’s the web!” Faulkner said, staring down at her iPad.
“So, pussification,” Gasparino said.
Several women on the couch gasped.
“Oh goodness gracious!” host Faulkner shouted, her head snapping up from her iPad. “I didn’t know that was coming!”
“Is that a problem?” Gasparino asked.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/fox-news-host-pussification-of-men
I’m not a big HRC fan, but if she runs, one maybe good thing is it will smoke out exactly how bigoted and nasty the GOP is. Aka, more GOP ‘outreach’.
For GOP being a ‘real man’ has devolved and decayed into being a brute who abuses whoever he can (Edit: and shoots people and blows up stuff-sorry, I almost forgot that. Any other interest has been declared ‘feminized’) By their standards, almost all of the US Founders and Framers were wimpy sissified girly men.
The Moar You Know
You know who gave a shitload of cash to that hellspawn of an initiative? Besides the Mormons?
Dentists.
So it was very helpful to be able to cull a bunch of folks out of the “new dentist pool” when mine retired based on whether they participate in bigotry or not.
And yes, donate to something like that, be prepared to pay the price. It’s only fair. Revealing donor names cost some folks a lot of money. Good. Cry me a fucking river.
Punchy
Hard to run a campaign so vast, full of such enormous hate and bigotry on $99 donations/per rich asshole.
Betty Cracker
@Tommy: I can understand wanting to keep your donations under wraps because you don’t think it’s anyone else’s business. But I’d rather err on the side of transparency. There’s such a giant opportunity for corruption (not to mention hypocrisy) if people can donate in secret.
Couldn't Stand the Weather
I wonder if that coach quoted Hans and Franz to the errant player he was so worked up about.
Between the DEA worrying about stoned rabbits in Utah and the Men’s Rights genius Gasparino, I don’t know if wingers are ecstatic or ludicrous (with apologies to In Living Color).
burnspbesq
There is no doubt that the Ninth Circuit got this right. And the Supremes were correct not to take the case.
Link to Ninth Circuit opinion.
http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/05/20/11-17884.pdf
jl
@Tommy: Don’t most of these disclosure laws have exemptions for small donations?
I can see why an ordinary small fry type person might want anonymity for contributions to controversial causes. That type of person can be hurt by retribution.
What is the rationale for anonymity for large corporations, mega-rich individuals, and large religious organizations?
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: @Amir Khalid: Ditto Amir. It’s one thing to donate to something you would be expected to support. It’s another to be the outwardly nice person that has your neighbor and his boyfried over for dinner, dogsits/catsits for them, lets your kindergartner knock on their door for candy at Hallowe’en, smiles and waves at their parents – and then donates five figures to a ballot item that strips them of recognition/rights/whatever because you’re Xtian and those dirty f#gg0ts deserve to burn in H3ll.
Tommy
@Amir Khalid: Beeing liberal and for gay rights are two difrrent things,
boatboy_srq
@Tommy: True, but being conservative and opposed to anyone’s rights – except your own – is the very definition of modern wingnut dogma. So your position on LGBT rights is a reasonable assumption if not an explicit corrolary, while the opposite position is a near-guarantee. SCOTUS and some of the think tanks may be resigning themselves to the inevitable, but it’s very clear that they are admitting that they cannot stop it rather than admitting that they might have been wrong about the morals of their old position.
aimai
@The Moar You Know: Also I don’t see what the fuss is about. Presumably these people who donated, like the Dentists or the Bakers, want the right to discriminate against gay patients or customers. So why would they object to having their names published? Surely they are anticipating and even demanding the right to refuse service to people on the basis of sexual orientation so they are going to need to put up signs identifyign themselves as homophobes at some point. Or how do they expect to signal to their customers who is worthy of service and who isn’t?
Belafon
@Tommy: Somewhat understandable, but without this kind of transparency, there’s no good way to figure out when, say, the Chinese government is donating to a candidate.
A Ghost To Most
@Tommy:
really? Cause they go hand in hand to me
Amir Khalid
@Tommy:
So you’re fine with people knowing you’re liberal, but you’d rather keep it under your hat that you’re for gay rights? Hmm.
dogwood
@The Moar You Know: @The Moar You Know:
Chances are that the dentists are Mormon. Out West Mormons are over-represented in that field. My community is probably about 20% Mormon, but around 80% of the dentists are Mormon.
Scout211
@Tommy:
This lawsuit is about campaign donations. By law, donor lists are required to be public. Especially here in Caifornia where so many laws are passed by ballot proposition. So many of these propositions are funded by giant corporations or political interest groups but advertised as grass roots movements that will benefit all. When you can see the donor and sponsor lists, voters have a better idea who the law will benefit.
boatboy_srq
@aimai: The dentistry aspect that TMYK points out may have bearing – as has some of the “victims” of nondiscrimination such as the bakeries. They want the business, but they think that they should be able to keep you as an individual customer; they have nothing against you, just against your relationship (as if the two were distinguishable). Keeping SSM off the books lets them keep the blinders on for a little longer – and keeps their wallets that much fuller.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
It does frequently seem that right-wingers want to go back to the “good old days” of being able to insult people to their faces knowing that the minority/gay/female person couldn’t do anything in response. Unfortunately for them, free speech goes both ways, so you can no longer be an asshole without consequences. Which is something that most of us learn by about age 12, but we’ve already noticed that right-wingers tend to be more than a little immature.
Botsplainer
I actually don’t have a problem with unlimited personal donations from citizens. Without transparency, though, non citizens can disrupt America’s political landscape, which I’m not cool with.
Also, I’m not cool with corporate political donations. Corporations are a pure creature of the state, and should be barred as a matter of law from political and advocacy donations. Further, inasmuch as ownership can be foreign, it is doubly inappropriate.
catclub
@Betty Cracker:
Huh? Why is a donation to a public advocacy group private business?
I can understand that some donors to some causes can prove damage, and those groups should get some privacy protection, but otherwise, no. Signers of voting rights petitions in 1960’s Mississippi come to mind as a special case. I don’t think Tommy is quite in that category.
delk
The haters always ask, “Why go to a florist that has deeply held religious beliefs when there are countless other florists? Or bakeries, or photographers, or B&B’s?”
How am I supposed to know who those people are? I got it, how about a nice list?
The Moar You Know
@Tommy: I have some good advice. Don’t give money or your vote to people who you wouldn’t want to be publicly linked with, because by fair means or foul, it will become known.
I don’t sign petitions for anything for exactly this reason even if I rabidly agree with the cause in question – someone is going to find out. And I might not want that to happen.
catclub
@Botsplainer:
I am amazed that the GOP is letting this aspect just slide right by. Maybe they assume that the Saudis
and their ilk favor their side.
boatboy_srq
@Botsplainer: Unlimited personal donations without transparency is about like minimal regulations with tort reform. All the impact and none of the consequences, and the push for each half of each equation is nearly the same (personal/corporate rights v. personal/corporate risk).
Doug r
@Couldn’t Stand the Weather: I believe one of the justices when he agreed with the ruling in Citizens United said that it should be easy to look up donors in this internet world.
gian
This very morning NPR ran interviews with civil rights marchers from 1960s Alabama.
Get seen and identified and your mother in law would get fired. So I had two take aways. New thought about “outside agitators” being harder to punish and what would Wal mart or Georgia pacific (a Koch brothers operation iirc) do to families of donors.
The Moar You Know
@Tommy: They certainly are. One is not required to be the other.
boatboy_srq
@boatboy_srq: I should add here that there is a difference between giving quietly and accepting that the donation is recorded somewhere someone could find the entry, and demanding that even the donation records be sealed so nobody could ever find and report it. The former is modesty; the latter is paranoia. “Liberal” and “paranoid” don’t intersect often.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@delk:
With the case currently going on in Washington state, the guy who sued had been using that florist for years, but she only told him that she thought he was a disgusting sinner who was going to burn in hell after he asked her to do the flowers for his (gay) wedding.
Funny how she felt comfortable enough with him to insult him to his face but was shocked that he would be so unfriendly as to sue her in return after he’d been a good customer for years. There’s a disconnect there that I just don’t get.
delk
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): She has a go fund me site up. Commenting was removed after two days.
http://www.gofundme.com/mz6zm4
sharl
I’ll offer some support for worrying about going public with your donations, based on my own experiences.
When I give, I try to be pretty generous about it, occasionally giving the maximum allowed by law. [I pull this off in part by being really selective, and only contributing after researching candidates as much as I can. And these past few years I haven’t had a lot of major expenses, thank goodness.]
I don’t worry about my contributions being a matter of public record, which in fact they are. But what can be VERY irksome is the subsequent unsolicited bombardment-by-phone from candidate campaign offices seeking my support. I deal with this by never answering the phone directly between 8am and 9pm (helps for non-political spammers too who choose to ignore the Do-Not-Call registry); thank you Maryland law! And my family and friends know this, and have alternative ways of reaching me. If political candidates want to reach me, they can leave a message on the answering machine (yup, I still have a land line, and that’s the only number I give out).
FEC used to require a work number for those of us contributing directly to a candidate above a certain amount. What a dumbass and unnecessary rule that was, and yes, I subsequently got some of those solicitation calls at work. Fortunately that requirement no longer shows up in donation sites, so I assume the rule went away.
Bottom line: I agree with disclosure rules like this, but they can have annoying consequences. Anyhoo, sucks to be the big money Yes-On-Eight h8rrrzzz, ha-ha.
boatboy_srq
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): @boatboy_srq: It’s all about the dollars, the blinders and the fact that single people don’t have Teh Secks (especially Teh Icky Ghey Secks) in their world. Sinners’ money is just as good as anyone’s as long as they don’t have to be reminded of it. The shock for the florist was that anyone would think of her as someone to [gasp] take to court when she’s just being a Gud Patriotic Hetero Xtian Real Ahmurrcan™.
mai naem mobile
@The Moar You Know: im assuming you live in CA so I don’t know if this applies in CA. We have a family friend who graduated from a top tier dental school specializing in orthodontics. He said its impossible to get into an orthodontics practice in the Phx area unless you’re Mormon so the dentist/Mormon may be a venn diagram.
Calouste
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): The only difference between these kind of people and a black hole is that nothing leaves a black hole, but nothing enters those people’s minds, otherwise they are just as self-centered and dense. They just never think about what other people would do, or how things would affect other people, or how other people would affect them. Once you see that, their behavior is easily explained.
Betty Cracker
@catclub: As I went on to say in that same comment, I think the cons of private donations outweigh the pros, so I’m for transparency. But I can understand the impulse to want to keep your political positions, etc., 100% private.
mai naem mobile
@Tommy: i don’t know.about organizations but i do know that with individual candidate donations your info is not available if you donate under $100. For me, I work in a Right to Fuck You state and i have no desire for an employer to know my politics so i just plain don’t donate more than $100 a candidate.
Calouste
@mai naem mobile: A Venn diagram might or might not include overlapping circles (or other shapes). For example O O is a Venn diagram with rational human beings as the left circle and GOP members of Congress as the right circle.
pacem appellant
Anyone know where I can look up the disclosures (since they’re public already)?
VincentN
@A Ghost To Most: Have you heard of Log Cabin Republicans? So being a liberal probably means you’re for gay rights but the opposite isn’t necessarily true.
sharl
@pacem appellant: You probably need a link to CA state’s site for that (CA Secretary of State I assume, but I’m not from there).
Here is FEC’s site for individual contributors.
Turgidson
@sharl:
Yeah, this is a real deterrent. I gave to Obama in 2008 and it seemed like my name found its way on to at least a couple dozen Democratic-affiliated issue campaigns, as well as the DSCC and DCCC. And the congressional committees were truly insufferable, trying to argue with me when I said I didn’t have room in the budget for a donation – one guy in particular started yelling at me when I told him I wasn’t going to donate to the DSCC to support Markey’s bid to replace Kerry in the Senate (“THAT IS HOW WE ENDED UP WITH SCOTT BROWN!!!”). AT the end of that conversation, I told the DSCC to take my name off their list and that I’d choose for myself whether and to whom to donate,and also calmly advised the charming fellow who had just yelled at me that he might consider changing his style if he wants people to give. He did not seem convinced. Oh well.
Partly because of aforesaid budget constraints, but also because I don’t want my name to get put on another dozen lists, I haven’t been in the donating mood since those charming conversations with the committees.
Amir Khalid
Off-topic, sorry; but could someone run this through the decoder and tell me what it means?
dedc79
@Turgidson: And when they’re taking your initial donation, they’ll swear to high heaven they won’t share your info with anyone else. It’s as bad, if not worse, than when stores ask for your contact info and promise not to share it.
The dirty secret with donations, well one of them, is that donor lists are extremely valuable and therefore end up getting shopped around when organizations are looking for additional funds.
sharl
The theologian L’Brondelle – keeper of the tenets of Calgaathu the Grain Father – does not speak to this matter, but it’s about time someone called out those shifty vegetarians!
Mike J
@sharl: When campaigns contact you with info you can verify they got from the FEC filing, ask to speak to the campaign’s lawyer/FEC compliance officer. Remind them of 2 U.S.C. §438(a)(4); 11 CFR 104.15.
Presumably campaigns that contact you will be ones that align politically with your previous gifts, so you don’t have to actually report them. A warning can save everyone some trouble though.
Woodrowfan
I agree that it should be open, at least above a certain amount. But I can understand a desire for privacy. Certainly it would not be beyond the rightwing to harass people who gave to leftwing causes. That was the whole point of groups like the White Citizens Council. They wouldn’t burn a cross on your lawn, that’s too crass. But they’d make sure you lost your job, or customers, or your mortgage would be called in, etc. That’s why states made it illegal for the public to look up care license plates. Anti-abortion nuts would use the info to harass women who went to a planned parenthood clinic.
scav
Would Tommy thus be more comfortable if all his gay friends, like all his gay donations, were invisible?
henqiguai
@brantl (#8):
Is there no poetry in yo’ soul?!
RSA
@mai naem mobile:
This is a really good example of the tension between transparency and privacy. In general I think it’s hard to come up with a rule that gives the “right” outcome in all situations.
JPL
@delk: I’m for a big sign on their doors. A bigot owns the store so enter at your own risk.
sharl
@Mike J: Thanks for that information; had I known this back when I got those calls at work – there were only a few, fortunately – I would have used that info. Although this bit may have been problematic, depending on the honesty and self-awareness (i.e., just where DID you guys get my name?) of whatever campaign office called:
When Al Franken’s volunteer did it, s/he was quite apologetic and gracious about it, and it never happened again. The candidate for the Dem primary for mayor of Baltimore, whom I’d never heard of? – not quite so gracious. Fortunately those calls at the workplace haven’t happened in a while.
Villago Delenda Est
They don’t want to be held accountable for their actions.
Typical Rethuglicans.
Tommy
@Amir Khalid: No not at all. I find myself asking if you are trying to pick a fight. I am all in for gay rights. I don’t need you to tell me this or that.
sharl
@Amir Khalid: Hah, my jokey comment at #56 was meant as a reply to your inquiry at #54.
(Just noticed I didn’t do the ‘reply’ linkage thang.)
Tenar Darell
@Amir Khalid: It is the problem of a very old conservative man not understanding basic plant biology combining with the teetotaler strain in multiple sects of Christianity, I think.
rikyrah
that poll today that came out that has them basically TIED
has got TPTB SHOOK.
they SHOOK .
they just KNEW that Rahm was gonna win last week
………………………………………………
Sen. Kirk: Chicago could end up like Detroit if Emanuel loses
USA TODAY 5:02 p.m. EST March 2, 2015
CHICAGO — With polls showing a close race in next month’s runoff mayoral election, Sen. Mark Kirk suggested on Monday that that the city could go the way of financially strapped Detroit if voters fail to re-elect Rahm Emanuel.
“The people who are running against Rahm don’t have the gravitas with the bond market. I would worry about the value of the Chicago debt if Rahm was not re-elected,” Kirk, R-Ill., told reporters at an event celebrating Casmir Pulaski, the Polish general who fought gallantly in the American Revolutionary War.
Mayor Emanuel and his challenger, Jesus “Chuy” (Chew-wee) Garcia, face voters in an April 7 runoff.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/03/02/chicago-mayoral-election-dead-heat-rahm-emanuel-chuy-garcia/24263201/
Botsplainer
@Couldn’t Stand the Weather:
Too many gay and gay-friendly glibertarian money men to ignore anymore. The world has moved on.
The new crime is going to be union membership, and not the civil kind.
Violet
@rikyrah:
Seriously? They have to tell people how to pronounce Chuy? That’s just sad.
The Moar You Know
@scav: Dick move on your part.
There’s plenty of places where knowledge that you’d done such a thing could cost your job, or your apartment, or worse. He’s right to be concerned about it. For example, being on a list of donors from Prop 8 caused me to take my business – worth a couple of grand a year, unless it’s a good year – to someone not on that donor list. That’s a real cost to someone for exercising their right to speech that I don’t like.
Now he knows the rules and won’t put himself in danger again, I am sure. But don’t pretend that exercising your right to speech – and money is speech, remember – can’t have any consequences for you that may be a lot more serious than you had initially considered.
Violet
@Amir Khalid: It doesn’t mean anything except “Send me money!” That’s all you need to know to translate anything a televangelist says.
Botsplainer
@The Moar You Know:
Dentists simply like it when people are unhappy. Everyone knows this,
I don’t know why the concept is so difficult – the fuckers sit there with their torture chairs, bright lights (“THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!” is what I yell every time I’m in one), whirring, shrill drills causing sharp pain….
chopper
@Betty Cracker:
shrug. it’s hard enough to deal with the idea that money is speech. at the very least it should be public speech.
sharl
@Violet: There is an excellent chance that I’m not representative,… but that pronunciation guidance was new and informative for this lifelong Northerner.
ETA: For quite a few years now I’ve gotten a whole lot of my news from written/printed sources, so while I’ve certainly seen that name in print, I don’t recall having heard it pronounced. No “Chuy’s” running for office in my area, as far as I can recall!
The Moar You Know
@Botsplainer: Glad someone else sees this coming. They’ve just about won the war on labor, but there’s still some pockets of resistance that are proving most troublesome.
And neither party gives a shit about labor. It’s obvious as of the last election that Democrats have calculated that they don’t need union money anymore. And that if they move just a little bit farther to the right, they never will again.
Hard times coming for working folks.
Violet
@sharl: Maybe it was a surprise to me because I’m closer to our southern border and have grown up with Spanish being spoken and a large Latino population. But Chelsea Handler’s former late night show she had a sidekick named “Chuy Bravo,” so I kind of figured the name was known.
Botsplainer
@The Moar You Know:
Nobody honors picket lines anymore (even tacitly, so as to get around Taft-Hartley). It’s a damn shame.
The plutocrats aren’t going to be moved on this until they experience some good old-fashioned labor violence. They figure they’ve co-opted gay white male money, and at least don’t have to face that anymore.
Do you know that there are no union coal miners working in Kentucky anymore? The UMW has been decimated, the mines broken up and parceled out among transnational entities that hide behind multiple shells of ownership so as to face no liabilities from inevitable safety deaths.
Botsplainer
Which side are you on?
http://wfpl.org/kentucky-doesnt-have-any-more-working-union-coal-miners/
They got ’em plenty of guns and Jesus, though.
scav
@The Moar You Know: Do we give full brownie points for watching civil rights demonstrations but not bothering with attending them? Yes, there are possible consequences, and yes there are dangers, but I’m not entirely wildly thrilled with awarding the full tiara of support for those unwilling to put anything on the line. Tommy, like most of us, is in a grey area. I’d rather we be uncomfortable about being in the grey area while also acknowledging that it’s necessary.
boatboy_srq
@chopper: Welcome to the Quiet Rooms candidate Rmoney suggested should be the places for these discussions.
/snark
SRW1
@Amir Khalid:
Why would you bother about the ramblings of a dude who doesn’t know the difference between ‘vegetable’ and ‘plant’. What it should indicate to you is that the mind of that person is already a vegetable. Probably too many power drinks in the context of bench pressing.
The Moar You Know
@scav: Nice change of subject.
That’s not the point, and you know it’s not the point. Your comment was vicious and not necessary.
Tommy did not understand that these contributions could be (and usually are) public knowledge. It’s obvious that his concern stems from the fact that such a gift could have serious personal consequences if his name is tied to said donation. Now he does. It’s as simple as that. He can choose what to do from here on out, making an informed choice.
satby
@Tommy: no, I think being liberal and for gay rights is the same thing.
Corner Stone
@The Moar You Know: Tommy is a thoroughly reprehensible individual, if real.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Tommy: Why are you so quick to wonder if Amir Khalid is picking a fight? That never would have crossed my mind. His question
seems quite reasonable to me. I know hundreds of people who claim to be liberal, and most of them actually are. Indeed a few are slightly to the left of Che. None of them oppose gay rights, and I doubt any of them would think anyone might even suspect that they don’t support gay rights. My data set may not be representative, and is certainly too small to be a legitimate sample. But based on my experience of liberals, AK’s question is not in any fashion combative.
TriassicSands
We had the same issue in Washington State, and, as in this case, it was the bigots trying to hide their identities. The State Supreme Court ruled they couldn’t. The bigots claimed they had a right to a secret ballot, but participating in ballot initiative campaigns is not voting — instead, it is legislating and the court found that legislating can’t be done in secret. That is true no matter what your position is — pro or con and it doesn’t matter if you’re a bigot or not. So, if someone on the pro side of the issue — the non bigots — wanted to hide their identity for some reason, they couldn’t either.
I think the recognition that ballot initiatives are not voting but legislating is an important one. Of course, the actual vote will be secret, although if an initiative were the only issue on the ballot, I wonder how the courts would rule if someone, for some reason, demanded to know the identities and votes of everyone who cast a ballot?
trollhattan
@Botsplainer:
Holy shit that’s astonishing. I’m ready to declare the Wowah on Coah at any time. Screw that rotten, vile industry and their vast array of enablers.
boatboy_srq
@Corner Stone: That’s a hell of a thing to say. I might remember that next time my straight friends ask for donations to support their right to procreate when and how they choose, because (by your math) unless I’m ready to go all in and stand in a picket line to ward off anti-choicers or march with with them holding the banner in front of SCOTUS when the next Roe comes up for discussion, then my dollars aren’t really support and I should keep my wallet shut.
Josie
@boatboy_srq: Not positive about this because one can never be positive about Cornerstone, but you might want to check your snark meter.
gelfling545
@aimai:
Sure, but they anticipate the pleasure of sneering at people from the height of their imaginary moral superiority.
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
Pat is still crazy, was always crazy, will always be crazy. He tries to hide his crazy under his religion, but since he can’t tell the difference between realistic religion and crazy religion, he leaks a lot.
Did this help?
There is a remark below your question with a good quote from the bible about how all the herbs are given to us for our use, which I have known religious pot smokers to use to justify using pot regardless of the laws against it. Not my style, but whatever…
burnspbesq
Amir,
Trying to understand Pat Robertson is as much a fool’s errand as trying to understand Sam Allardyce.
Kropadope
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I think Tommy may be a victim of inelegant phrasing. He may not want his donation known because he’s not looking for credit of plaudits. I better statement may have been “I don’t need anyone to know about my donation.”
El Caganer
@Botsplainer: And it really sucks when they ask you, “Is it safe?”
Another Holocene Human
@jl: I’ll wait right here for Gasparino’s “I was spanked as a child and look how I came out! QEFD!” video. It will look good on the credenza next to Hannity and Malkin’s ode to the belt.
Another Holocene Human
@Turgidson: I wish he would have called me, I would have told him a thing or two. That race (Markey) was in the primary, it had nothing to do with money, and thankfully the voters of MA made the right choice. There was plenty of money to run the general and I would have laughed out loud at the suggestion that Markey/bqwhatevr was anything like the Brown/Coakley race.
It’s almost contemptible the way they lie to and mislead donors, like yeah they need the bux in a major media market but they have plenty of local d-bags to fund that shit, plus the DSCC funds themselves because the big states are more politically connected. It’s the smaller races, like rural House races, where Dems are getting crushed on money and it actually matters. Also state lege races. It’s painful.
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: hahahaha, shows whose Rahm’s friends are, the 1%, we knew that, but tea-curious Sen Kirk just shows their hand there, lololol.
Chuy lacks “gravitas”, uh-huh.
Another Holocene Human
@Kropadope: That’s how I took it. And depending what organization he donates to and how much it might very well stay between him and the charity. What’s at issues here are donations to PACs, granted we gays have our PACs and it is a necessity but there are lots of kinds of organizations. For example there is a group that works on immigration issues for GLBT families and they have both a charity arm and a political arm and you can donate to one or both. On a 990 I believe only the largest donors are listed to a charity/501(3)c organization.
Kropadope
@Another Holocene Human: that said, it is kind of a tough line to walk. I do think you should be able to donate to charity anonymously, however many such organizations conduct politics and I think it is important to know who’s funding political campaigns.
Yes, some of these places have individual arms, one concerned with pure charity, the other with politics. I’d wager a fair bit that most such organizations consider their donations fungible. One arm can easily pass to the other. Not an exact analogy, but think of the Chamber of Commerce and foreign donations.
henqiguai
@Violet (#77):
Who’s Chelsea Handler?
See how that works? Where I live there’re as many Korean-Americans as Brazilians; should I then be surprised if everyone doesn’t know how to properly enunciate Hangul or Portuguese? (Yeah, I know, dead thread…)
brantl
@henqiguai: Sure, but I’m also a big fan of direct, explicit meaning in communication.
boatboy_srq
@Josie: a) my own snark must be drier than usual; and b) snark or no, it was a hell of a thing for CS to say, even in jest.
Socrates
Being against same-sex marriage is like being a member of the Ku Klux Klan?