E-Klan Robes

The argument is utterly absurd on its face.

Here in my home state of Washington and now in Federal Court in California right-wing bigots are claiming the right to wear virtual hoods over their heads. The ironic and absurd contention is that if these terrorists are identified in public they may be subjected to ridicule and intimidation. On its face their argument is that we bigots have an inalienable right to intimidate others but no one else should dare to assert a phony right to intimidate us.

The issue here is not race hatred but rather hatred of gays, lesbians and transgendered individuals who are seeking equal rights with their heterosexual peers.

Back in May of 2009 the Washington Legislature finally gathered the courage to pass what we refer to as the "Everything But Marriage Act" allowing domestic partners of either sex the full benefits of marriage but without legalizing same-sex marriage per se. This act skirted an issue in Washington created by the bigots themselves. In 1998 a voter initiative passed creating a Washington State "Defense of Marriage Act". Marriage, which has had a sad and checkered history throughout time, has been an institution used briefly and, sometimes often, for a half century in America but the threat from which the red-neck bigots and fundamentalist loonies found it needed defending was the possibility that couples of the same sex might marry. Their hysterical rant claimed that heterosexual marriages were somehow threatened by homosexual marriages. How and to what effect they never could coherently specify. The best argument they could muster was that their Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky said it was a no-no. This, of course, came from people whose direct antecedents claimed that Afro-Americans were an "inferior" race based on the advice of that same Big-Imaginary-Friend-In-The-Sky. With the Washington "Defense of Marriage Act" on the books, legislators had to tread a bit lightly. Thus they did not do the obvious and correct thing in having the "Defense of Marriage Act" declared unconstitutional followed by passage of a bill extending full marital rights to same-sex couples.

Light tread or not, the bigots marshaled their night-riders and set out to terrorize the state. On September 1, 2009 the Republican Washington Secretary of State certified initiative petitions containing enough signatures to put Referendum 71 on last November's ballot. The bigots are not without lawyers. After all Kenneth Starr and Antonin Scalia are, sadly, still breathing. They managed to couch the petition in language sufficiently obtuse that a Yes vote retained the "Everything But Marriage Act" while a No vote would have repealed it. Thanks, in part, to the bigots' efforts to confuse voters about their purpose and their success in doing so, Referendum 71 was defeated in the 2009 state elections. But what is relevant here is the history between September 1 and November 5, 2009.

Initiative petitions are public documents. That is and has been settled law in Washington State and throughout the United States. But when a pro-gay rights group in Washington announced plans to create a public, on-line database of the signers of the Referendum 71 petitions, all hell broke loose amongst those awaiting The Rapture. Good heavens! They were simply trying to deny equal rights to others and now they might face discriminatory treatment themselves! Horrible! That is, after all, why Klansmen wore hoods!

The courts, up to the U. S. Supreme Court in the person of "Justice" Anthony Kennedy, decided to punt on the issue. If I am being charitable, and, being a dyed-in-the-wool Lefty, I must be even when it grates, I suspect that the punt was meant to split the difference between the settled law that the petition signers' names are public records and the worry that they would be targeted for some unspecified violence (burning rainbows on their front lawns?). In any case, election day, 2009 came and went. The odious Referendum 71 went down to well deserved defeat and the case became moot.

Now we have a trial in Federal Court in San Francisco, California raising the issue of the even more odious Proposition 8 which actually amended the California Constitution to outlaw same sex marriages. Judge Vaughn R. Walker presiding over the case, a Libertarian-leaning appointee of Poppy Bush, wanted to televise the proceedings. Once again the right-wing night-riders objected to having their hoods removed for a broad public claiming that they might be subject to witness intimidation. A compromise went for nothing and now the Supreme Court, once again in the person of Anthony Kennedy, has punted but this time with a level of unabashed absurdity that exponentially exceeds the Washington case.

Indeed, the bigots won't appear in inglorious color on YouTube but there is nothing to prevent any person attending the court proceedings from reporting their names and other identifying information in any public forum available. In short, the Supreme Court injunction will do nothing but turn a video record into verbal reportage.

Yet the very real issue is one of darkness and light. Light, whether sunlight or scrutiny, disinfects. Lots of noisome things grow in the dark. The bigots who promote gay bashing, whether in individual, physical attacks or in public legislative attacks on our gay brothers and sisters, need to be brought out into the light to disinfect our society. The real issue is that these bigots are ashamed of their vile bigotry just as the Klansmen that they resemble needed hoods to hide their identities from the larger public. When we turned over the racist rocks under which Byron dela Beckwith, Cecil Price, Lawrence Rainey, Sam Bowers, Robert Chambliss and Thomas Blanton cowered, the killings and bombings stopped and Afro-Americans could go about their business in Mississippi and Alabama with far less fear than when the hate of those monsters festered in the darkness. It's now time to expose the current crop of night-riding bigots to the light so that their public shame and native cowardice ends this odious chapter of American bigotry.

We had to wait thirty years for the play and subsequent movie Inherit the Wind publicly showing the vacuousness of the fundamentalists in the Scopes Monkey Trial. I doubt that we will have to wait so long for the public display and discrediting of this new subset of bigots. It won't do away with the bigotry in itself just as we are still battling over evolution eighty-five years after William Jennings Bryan discredited himself and fundamentalism in Dayton, Tennessee. However, dragging the bigots into the light will quiet them and purge the public forum of their hateful viciousness.

We need this publicity not only for ourselves but for our world as well. The fundamentalist bigots are now financing and promoting gay bashing legislation in Uganda that is only slightly different from that in Hitler's Germany. Their churches and the overflowing, tax-free offerings on which their ministries of hate depend operate in darkness. They preach that they "hate the sin but love the sinner" while sponsoring the death penalty for the sinner. Public exposure of their bigotry will necessarily cut into the offerings in the plates passed on Sunday mornings as people unwilling to be publicly associated with such odious policies opt for other, less extreme places of worship.

So I am cheerfully awaiting the first reports of the names, addresses and even cell phone pictures of the bigots who want to deny that most American belief that "all men are created equal" and the fulfillment of that in the assertion that we all have equal rights regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, or who we love.