Zip Up Your Skirt and Get In The Ring
by Josh K-sky on Jun.19, 2010, under Politics
Dahlia Lithwick is a little too subtle when she asks the question “What happens to our civic life when we’re all too scared to participate?”
In the wake of Prop 8′s passage, activists publicized the names of individual donors to Yes on 8 and encouraged boycotts. To find tactics she calls “inexcusable and genuinely threatening”, Lithwick links to an editorial by the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial page editor, who writes:
Protesters have shouted insults at people headed to worship; temples and churches have been defaced. “Blacklists” of donors who contributed to Yes on 8 are circulating on the Internet, and even small-time donors are being confronted. A Palo Alto dentist lost two patients as a result of his $1,000 donation. The artistic director of the California Musical Theatre resigned to spare the organization from a fast-developing boycott. Scott Eckern, the artistic director of the Sacramento theater group and a Mormon, had given $1,000 to Yes on 8.
Not quite Mississippi Burning. Let’s break it down: “People headed to worship” presumably means in the Mormon church, which raised $40 million to pass Prop 8. It makes me happy to know that people are shouting insults at them. Existing laws prohibit defacing temples and churches; I bravely submit that they should be enforced. If I found out that the money I was spending on my dentist was going to defeat marriage rights, I would find a new dentist and I would thank the person who told me.
I personally feel ambivalent about using a boycott of an organization to drive an individual with repellent views from his job. I might question it as a tactic. But there’s no question that people have the right to not direct their funds where they will be used to hurt them politically. I think the Prop 8 donors who cry scared are genuinely surprised that they don’t have a right to be liked. I think they’re surprised that people take it personally when they prevent them from marrying.
I think they’re scared in part by their own empathy — the yawp of rage that sounded after Prop 8 won made them feel, for the first time, just how bad gay people felt at being told they couldn’t marry. Knowing for a moment that anger, it scared them to know that someone else had it towards them.
Justice Scalia, mirabile dictu, gets it right. Lithwick:
While he acknowledged that threats of violence and hate mail can be scary and should be addressed by other legal means, Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed Bopp’s concern that one’s political opponents are just a mouse-click away from hunting you down as “touchy-feely, oh-so-sensitive.” An exasperated Scalia warned at oral argument that “you can’t run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known.”
The United States has a robust avenue for anonymous political participation. Besides your blog. I speak of the vaunted secret ballot. If you want to anonymously support a cause, do so on election day. Otherwise, if you put your money where your mouth is, be prepared that others may do so as well.