It doesn’t take all that many bigots to put a small number of targets in a bad situation.
technically, the guy has the law on his side, but what he’s doing is very inappropriate to the point of being downright despicable.
A while back, after Prop 8 passed in CA, there was some discussion about publishing the list of people who donated money in support of it, and the consensus seemed to be that it was public information and therefore was perfectly fine, even to be lauded, to not only publish the information, but to use it against them. How is this really any different?
I wasn’t a fan of the Prop 8 outing. But there is at least one major difference. The Prop 8 backers were explicitly participating in a form of public discourse. They were actively choosing to try to convince people to support their political views through the purchasing of public airtime. And there is a compelling public interest in allowing people to know who is trying to influence the vote.
As far as I can tell this GLBTF group is making no such public attempt to influence people. But as long as they take any public money or recieve offical recognition of any sort I think the guy probably should have access if he wants it.
This is just what I was wondering. If these were independent organizations the city wouldn’t have any info on them to release. The practical result of sponsoring such groups is in fact to “out” these people – to each other. So why they wouldn’t not expect their information to be available to a wider pool of people, I don’t know.
The paranoid part of me thinks the city has a role in these to collect private information on their employees.
If this is an open club it would be very cool if this drove up membership to a huge level where it became impossible to tell one Sneetch from another.
But I agree with tomndebb’s point that it’s potentially dangerous for any such group to receive financial support from the government, if that is happening.
It may not be financial support other than resources - i.e. maintaining an email list in Exchange, providing conference rooms for meetings. A lot of my corporations “employee clubs” have just that level of support. But government regulations can be tricky things and even that level of support can count.
Apologies in advance for a bit of a hijack.
I’ve just read this, and the articles, with some interest. I work for the civil service in the UK (H M Revenue & Customs, as it goes) and we set up a national LGB network a couple of years ago. There’s a separate trans network, and a couple of other networks for other groups too.
We have a membership list which we are told is totally confidential, and it’s certainly not available generally to employees. As with the Seattle group, you don’t have to be LGB to join, so we have the ‘friends’ aspect too. We’ve also recently been given a web-based message board, and the network coordinator uses our work email to distribute various things.
We also have a (straight - this is still the British senior civil service, dontchaknow!) board member as our sponsor, and he’s very positive about the whole thing.
I’m wondering how something like this would play out over here. HMRC have recently developed a booklet targeted and LGB taxpayers, covering things like inheritance tax, capital gains tax, tax credits etc, as they apply to this particular group of people, in and out of civil partnerships. We produce many such booklets targeted at particular groups, but this one has generated some quite unpleasant coverage in certain parts of the press. The Daily Mail (see the last four paragraphs of this article) loved it, of course, as did the Telegraph. And this was something on which we spent the princely sum of £1,536!
I suspect a lone troublemaker, acting as an individual, would achieve less over here, and generally is less likely to happen (though what do I know). I am wondering, though, in light of these two stories, what would happen should an enterprising journalist make a Freedom of Information request on our membership list, the money spent on our network…?
Personally I’m not too fussed should my name get released (in fact, I’d take a negative Daily Mail article about anything I’m associated with as a badge of pride!) but it’s a tad concerning to think that our nice little network could be the subject of some moronic journalist’s bile and vitriol. Ah well, I supose it’d at least give the Telegraph something to fill those column inches with once they’ve wrung every last drop out of the expenses story.
Anyway. I’m fully in support of the idea of a campaign by the Seattle group to get all and sundry to join up, to thwart this guy’s oh-so-cunning plan. He may be entitled to the information, but they can make damn well sure it’ll do him no good.
If I recall the article correctly, this person expressly described part of his motivation as tit-for-tat on that issue.
Well, one major difference is that the people who were on the lists of Prop 8 donors had actually taken some sort of action to raise the ire of their opponents. This guy is going after gays, basically, just for existing. As I said a year ago, when the Prop 8 boycotts were in the news, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this tactic. It’s the ends to which it is used that determine if it’s ethical or not.
Which makes his motive even more questionable, because he’s not going “tit-for-tat” against the people who actually participated in the Prop 8 boycotts, he’s going after people who happen to share an unrelated characteristic. He’s got no way to know if any of the people in this group supported the idea of the boycotts, let alone if they’d participated - and since they’re not even in California, that’s pretty unlikely.
Yeah, I know what you mean. 99% of those christians give a bad name to the rest of you.
Update from the other local paper; has some additional info.
I read the article to see if he actually said that. Yes, he seriously thinks there’s some ‘secret gay organization’ like it’s the Mafia or something.
I thought this was amusing;
It stands for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Friends organization. He is (ostensibly) none of those, so why would they let him join? 