The reason Klansmen wore hoods back in the Jim Crow era had little to do with hiding their faces from those whom they were out to torment, as we might suppose today. African-Americans had virtually no legal standing as witnesses against them. The hoods were mainly meant to instill fear in their victims, but they also concealed the Klansmen’s identities from their white peers, most of whom supported segregation but did not countenance church bombings, lynchings and the Klan’s other terror tactics.

In a move that is shockingly reminiscent of Klansmen donning their white hoods, activists behind last year’s anti-gay Proposition 8 campaign are suing to overturn California campaign finance laws that require making public the names of donors to political causes. The objective of these professional hate-group organizers is to enable their donors to conceal their bigotry from colleagues and neighbors who don’t share their obsessive hatred of gays:

[Anti-gay activists] claimed that donors to Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California after one of the most heated campaigns in recent memory, have been the victim of threats and harassment because of their support for ending same-sex marriage was made public.

“This harassment is made possible because of California’s unconstitutional campaign finance disclosure rules as applied to ballot measure committees where even donors of as little as $100 must have their names, home addresses and employers listed on public documents,” Ron Prentice, head of the Protect Marriage Coalition, said in a statement.

Leaving aside the absurdity of folks who last year donated $40 million to force the repeal of the civil rights of millions of Californians whining now about “harassment,” it’s passing strange that people who say their opposition to gay civil rights is based on moral imperatives and even the Bible would tacitly admit, via this lawsuit, that their cause is so shameful that they must change the law so they can do their skullduggery in secret.

Anti-gay activists should take note that Klansmen today no longer hide their racism under bedsheets. They proudly call themselves “white separatists,” and some, like David Duke, even appear on television wearing business suits. It’s puzzling why homophobes don’t feel a similar sort of pride. If they’re certain God is on their side, why does it matter if their neighbors and colleagues shun them because of their beliefs?

On the other hand, maybe the unintentional admission of shame underlying this lawsuit can be taken as a hopeful sign that even they recognize that their bigotry is wrong.

In an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, Bob Barr, the author of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, recants his support of the law, which prevents gay marriages from being recognized across state lines.

The public was first introduced to Bob Barr in 1994, when he came to Congress as one of the freshmen class of snarling Gingrichite House Republicans. It was Barr who first submitted a bill of impeachment against Pres. Clinton, well before Clinton had lied in a civil-lawsuit deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He advocates repealing DOMA now, in part because in the intervening years he has become a civil liberties-loving libertarian, who was, in fact, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candiate last year. Here’s Barr’s explanation of his change in heart:

I’ve wrestled with this issue for the last several years and come to the conclusion that DOMA is not working out as planned. In testifying before Congress against a federal marriage amendment, and more recently while making my case to skeptical Libertarians as to why I was worthy of their support as their party’s presidential nominee, I have concluded that DOMA is neither meeting the principles of federalism it was supposed to, nor is its impact limited to federal law.

In effect, DOMA’s language reflects one-way federalism: It protects only those states that don’t want to accept a same-sex marriage granted by another state. Moreover, the heterosexual definition of marriage for purposes of federal laws — including, immigration, Social Security survivor rights and veteran’s benefits — has become a de facto club used to limit, if not thwart, the ability of a state to choose to recognize same-sex unions.

Even more so now than in 1996, I believe we need to reduce federal power over the lives of the citizenry and over the prerogatives of the states. It truly is time to get the federal government out of the marriage business. In law and policy, such decisions should be left to the people themselves.

What Barr doesn’t mention in the op-ed piece is the toxic levels of political hypocrisy that tainted the passage of DOMA. First of all, there were no high-minded principles behind it. DOMA was sent up by the Republicans as a wedge issue between Pres. Clinton and his gay supporters in the 1996 presidential campaign, which was entering its final heat when the bill passed and Clinton signed it in late September. Yes, it tossed red meat to the gay-hating GOP base, but any pleasure it gave them or damage it might do to the lives of gay people was just a lagniappe for its framers. As a political tool, however, DOMA was a failure, since most gay people saw through it and voted for Clinton, who won reelection handily that November.

Secondly, the four men who pushed DOMA into law all were marriage-abusers. Barr was in his third marriage at the time, and has been accused by his second wife of cheating on her with the woman who became his third wife. Sen Bob. Dole, who shepherded the bill through the Senate before he resigned to focus on his presidential campaign against Clinton that year, left his first wife and child for a flight attendant. More significantly, DOMA would have gone nowhere without the blessing of then-House Speaker Net Gingrich, and, of course, it could not have become law if Pres. Clinton hadn’t signed it. We later learned that both Gingirch and Clinton were engaged in extramarital affairs at the time DOMA was being debated.

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