If the recently ascended head of the Salvation Army were revealed to be a vocal atheist–say, they were outed as the pseudonymous author of a popular and strident atheist blog–and the rank and file went into open revolt at having them in charge, and they were pressured to step down, that doesn’t seem problematic to me. Organizations and communities that are built around particular values are under no obligation to follow a leader who is antagonistic to those values, or to give them the benefit of the doubt against demonstrable, contrary evidence.
Your analogy is perfect. What he did, of course, is the 21st century version of kidnapping, raping, and murdering someone because he suspected that person is gay. Yay analogies!
Here’s a chance for another!
Yep, just keep waging war on people who disagree with you. I can assure you that you indeed are part of the rot in our society. This is not different at all than the Scott Walker supporters going about a campaign of retribution against people who exercised their constitutional right to sign a petition. And the more each side does this the more common it gets and the worse our society becomes.
But hey, fuck him man, you disagreed with this guy’s political opinion so no holds barred, more power to you.
When someone is engaged in what should be an intrinsically private thing (exercising a political right that does not entail public speaking, electioneering, campaign work, blogging, etc), it’s intrinsically bad for any negative thing at all to happen to him because of who he votes for. I’d even argue it’d be bad, in 1933, to go after someone just because they voted for Adolf Hitler. The way you fix societal problems is not to punish people for their thoughts.
That is a great point, and I completely agree with it.
However, we’ve seen no evidence that a large portion of Mozilla’s user base supports ssm to the point of boycotting their favorite browser over the new CEO’s past political views. It seems quite likely (given the number of users arguing each side*) that the outcry is actually just a small minority of the population throwing a fit over a perceived injustice/threat about which they are underinformed.
How many people objecting to the new CEO were actually users or potential users of Firefox? What proportion of FF users were actually opposed to the new CEO because of his political views? How many pro-gay rights people opposed the boycott but were afraid to speak up for fear of being branded a bigot or homophobe?
- The bits of the debate I’ve witnessed, (including this thread) feature a small number of users arguing very stridently (i.e. more impassioned than logical) with a much larger, less-interested opponent.
Intrinsically private? It’s publicly disclosed. If you mean it’s personal, sure. But there’s nothing private about making a campaign contribution.
As long as he’s torturing puppies to death and murdering Jews by the million, I’ll keep waging war on him.
Yes he did. A contribution like that IS expressing his opinion, speaking out against my right to marriage and trying to put that opinion into law, to the detriment of other people.
It’s disgusting, regardless of the amount. $1 or $1 million, the person deserves scorn.
I’m saying it should be private. For reasons far beyond the Eich case. A restaurant manager actually had riot police sent outside of the restaurant where she worked, because they found out she had donated $100 to the Prop 8 campaign. Others who worked for conservative organizations ran into trouble when they were outed as people who hadn’t donated to the Prop 8 campaign.
In other States, with similar disclosure laws to California, people have told challengers for political office they were afraid to donate to their cause because they were afraid of souring their relationship with the sitting incumbent and he would have access to the information on who had donated against him.
To me it seems like all the good reasons voting is secret, are good arguments for why donating should be too.
Harassing people is inappropriate and that’s another story. Making decisions on who to patronize is fair game. But… don’t worry. The way things are going the Supreme Court will rule that political donations should be unlimited and nobody will actually ever make a traceable donation again.
The problem is the list itself. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” is no way to run a society. These lists can and are being used for political reprisal. Not just by LGBT activists against those who disagree with them (which you seem fine with) but by Republican Governors to punish people who signed a petition. By shady conservative business men who put pressure on those who didn’t make contributions they were supposed to make. And by incumbents who use them as “loyalty lists” to make sure no one had “backed the other guy”, and obviously they would give unequal treatment to those who had backed the other guy.
That just doesn’t seem like something we should want the State facilitating. Even if it does mean a guy who worked on a web browser and whom no one could name before last week gets to secretly donate $1,000 to Prop 8.
Or we could take money out of these kinds of campaigns. No wait- that’s crazy. Money is speech, so letting people give whatever they want in secret sounds like the way to go.
I’d like a list of the membership of various LGBT organizations so I can arrange negative publicity against their members. Is that cool?
Actually no, because NAACP v. Alabama (1958) makes that unconstitutional to require such disclosure of membership to the government who could then of course publish it. “Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.”
Maybe we should abolish anonymous speech, as that is inimical to the public interest, we’ve abolished anonymous contributions after all. But wait, wasn’t Common Sense and The Federalist Papers published anonymously precisely? Oh, and the Supreme Court struck down State laws prohibiting anonymous political speech in a 7-2 decision in 1995. So that’s also unconstitutional.
I think there’s a strong argument we need similar protections for contributions–precisely because they are being used for retaliatory purposes. In the case of incumbents, they actually contribute to public corruption. Since both sides appear to be abusing this I don’t see why both sides wouldn’t want to end the practice.
That’s very clever, please continue on–you’re giving a good accounting of yourself.
Anything else that’s obviously different from a campaign contribution that you’d like to compare to a campaign contribution, Martin Hyde?
I’m more or less fine with that in terms of “big money.” But I doubt we’re going to ban all political donations of all sizes. People in these instances are being harassed over $100-1000 donations.
But the way you get money out of politics isn’t by reimposing the last 40 years of failed campaign finance laws (which never worked and just had many different routes of circumvention.) Instead you have to do what other Western Democracies do and limit what you can spend this money on in the first place, which will dramatically limit its importance. Namely, severely restrict (as most countries do) political advertisements on TV and allot equal ad time (in very limited amounts) to the candidates. Or even take one from the British playbook and prohibit them on the TV at all.
You’ll still need money to organize a ground game and things of that nature, but without the big ticket advertising a lot of this money just has nowhere to go.
Unfortunately my opinion is you can’t do this without a constitutional amendment, I don’t believe the First Amendment allows for this in its present form under any rationale you can come up with for doing it.
I have no problem with disclosure of the financial support of any campaign. Knowing where the money comes from is an important part of the process. I’d rather the risks you mention than the risk of people buying elections without people knowing.
Maybe you’d like to explain why, if a valid constitutional concern about political group membership and political publications is that dissident voices would potentially be squelched when they represent an offensive minority viewpoint if those memberships and publications could not be secret, why a similar constitutional concern does not exist in terms of contributions.
Once you can do that maybe I’ll stop bringing them up. But otherwise you and LHoD are just making non-argument childish remarks because you dislike the use of absolutely, unimpeachably appropriate analogies.
There is no such risk. Since only legal contributions are made, there is nothing improper with any of them and the public has no interest in knowing who made them. Since it is illegal to buy an election, you could only do so through extralegal means and thus that would not involve FEC reported contributions.
Maybe I’m confused…but without the reporting how do we know the contributions are legal?
They just don’t have anything in common. On one hand you have a hypothetical where the state compels a private association to disclose its membership. On the other you have “speech,” meaning the funding of elections to public office and campaigns to influence laws. That’s a matter of public concern and it relates to the way the government works.