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Written by Brian Miller
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Friday, 09 January 2009 00:00 |
Remember the rhetoric around California's Proposition 8 the day it passed with a tiny 52% to 48% margin?
Cheering bigots crowed that "the people had decided" and that no "activist court" should be allowed to proclaim that the constitutional rights of a group of people are applicable if a simple majority votes otherwise.
But fast forward to today, when the forces behind Proposition 8 filed a lawsuit demanding an end to California's campaign donation registry.
The sweet irony? The public finance disclosure requirement the bigots are attempting to overturn was created by Proposition 34, a ballot initiative that received 60% of voters' support. That's a margin of passage far, far greater than Proposition 8.
So the band of bigots, as usual, wants it both ways. A court challenge to barely-passed Prop 8 would, in the words of Clinton-cock-sniffer and Pepperdine putz Kenneth Starr, trigger a "constitutional crisis." But a court challenge to decisively-passed Proposition 34? No problem!
And amusingly enough, as part of their court case, the bigot brigade are attempting to invent new rights for themselves, such as the right not to be boycotted. From the filing:
Businesses employing people who contributed to the Proposition 8 campaign have been threatened with boycotts
This is interesting, since it was bigots themselves who initiated threats of boycotts early in the campaign.
And, of course, last time we checked, people were free to choose not to spend their money with bigots. In this economic pinch, that's got to be hurting them. But we don't see any constitutional right to getting other people's money through deception, try as they might.
Another lament is that people are being called on the carpet, in public. Apparently, the bigots at Yes On 8 don't want to actually be called on the carpet in public, and don't want their supporters to encounter debate.
In fact, the court filing is filled with whiny stories of bigots who don't like that people know how they donated. One man complains of a mailing to his hometown, pointing out that he's a bigot. Another woman wheedles about how her business is being boycotted due to her sizable contribution to the bigot amendment. A third complainant says he's tired of people confronting him on his vote.
I guess that pesky right to dissent, debate, and freely speak is getting to the Yes On 8 dingalings.
And finally, there are the usual claims of "violence and threats." Of course, the complaints are bogus. The "vandalism to property" claimed was almost certainly committed by pro-Prop-8 folks to create even more of a wheedly victimhood mentality for themselves. Virtually none of the fabricated "violence" resulted in a police report or investigation -- further underscoring its lack of veracity.
Not to mention that the right wing has an established record of lying about being violently attacked by their opponents. It's a natural character flaw for these guys (along with their dislike for the Constitutional rights of others, and their incessant demands for special rights for themselves!)
The good news? I can think of several different bits of it:
1) Support for Proposition 8 is clearly shameful and the bigots are reaping the full reward of discomfort and public humiliation for supporting a law that revokes the constitutional rights of others;
2) In the severely softening economy, the bigots are realizing that the families and individuals they hate constitute a large portion of their business -- who can and will take their business elsewhere;
3) If these two trends continue, the proponents of Proposition 8 will be consigned by mainstream historians to the same category as their ideological bretheren in the KKK, Segregationist movement, and other discredited hate movements;
4) This case makes the Prop 8 bigots look like the spineless, weak-willed, self-indulgent pricks that most of us on the No On 8 campaign side knew them to be.
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