“We have nothing to hide here,” Frank Schubert, campaign manager for Proposition 8, said to the Los Angeles Times, apparently without irony. “We are really trying to protect the privacy of people.”
Schubert, who has a gay sister but who nonetheless commissioned Prop 8’s scurrilously false ad campaign, is referring to a lawsuit filed by anti-gay groups that seeks to overturn California laws that require that the identities of donors to political campaigns be made public.
The purpose of the law is to prevent money-laundering. The fact that the donor disclosures exposed a few bigots to their customers, colleagues and neighbors is a bonus.
Anti-gay operatives say the law must be overturned because their donors have received death threats and their homes have been vandalized. But these incidents have not been well-documented, and apparently no arrests have been made.
On the other hand, there have been many highly publicized incidents in which donors were shamed and scorned and lost their jobs when their secret antipathy toward gay people was revealed.
What’s really going on with this lawsuit, however, is likely nothing more than greed. Anti-gay groups have raised hundreds of millions of dollars by fanning the flames of homophobia. With this lawsuit, professional anti-gay operatives and consultants are seeking to give their donors cover so that they can contribute to the next anti-gay ballot campaign operation in secret.
State Attorney General Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and the Fair Political Practices Commission, California’s ethics agency, are fighting the lawsuit, and legal analysts say it has little likelihood of success.
