A likely unpopular musing on some anti-prop 8 activity

[jlh]

I have to admit, the Prop 8 Map, which combines the list of donors to anti-Prop 8 organizations with googlemaps, worries me. I know it's all public information. But it's one thing to have a list of businesses to boycott, and quite another, I feel, to know what street someone who donated $50 lives on. (Yes, I've found folks on the map who donated that little.) I've donated money to political organizations here and there, and I stand by it, but I'm not sure I wouldn't feel just a little more reluctant to give $25 a year to Planned Parenthood, especially if I lived in a mainly pro-life area, if I thought that a bunch of folks could come protest at my door. I worry that this sort of thing works to limit political speech, to reduce the effect that Obama just had, to push small donors out of the system because there's just too much risk inherent in donating against your local grain. Which, of course, will just make the people with money even more powerful.

I know I'm a little bit biased about this. The first time I ran into something of this sort was when someone took the state-by-state registries of sex offenders and put them on what must have been a precursor of googlemaps a few years ago. Some of the parents on my flist praised this and saw it as a wonderful tool but I couldn't help but worry about the possibility of harassment. You might think that anyone who commits a crime that gets them on such a list is deserving of whatever they get, but in some states the bar is quite low. In any case, my father was on the list until his death; luckily, Maine doesn't make the full addresses public, or I would have worried for my mother's safety, living as they do on a quiet country road. (And certainly I was pleased to see the swiftness with which they took him off the list after he died.)

Maybe this isn't a great parallel. Maybe my mother deserved to be harassed by anyone with a grudge for staying with my father after his crimes; maybe he deserved to worry that someone might burn down the house. (It's happened, where the addresses were made public.) Maybe that was an incendiary tangent that I just went on. But I do worry that maps like this will have a chilling effect on political involvement. I know that in moving against Prop 8 there's a wish to shame the people who donated to its passage, but can this not be done in reverse? And is the $25 you gave to that political action committee worth protesters at your door?

Comments

[cricketnyc.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you'd heard about the recent situation in Sacramento. The artistic director of Music Circus, the biggest summer stock theater in the country, was listed as donating (he's mormon), and they listed his position with the theater. He was forced to resign. I still don't know how I feel about that, really. If he had not included the name of the theater when making the donation, had he made it anonymously, perhaps I would have less of an issue. After all, he is entitled to have opinions different from my own (and he is a member of a powerful church with opinions different from my own). But, knowing this is a matter of public record, I understand how so many people in the theater community (and ultimately, his theater's Board of Directors), wanted him out on his ass. This is a man who works with hundreds of homosexuals every year- actors, dancers, designers, composers, patrons... as Marc Shaiman said in his statement, he makes his living off of gays, but believes they should not be entitled to equal rights. They star in shows, they design the costumes, the buy the tickets, but they're not entitled to the same rights that he is? There were threatened boycotts, and in this era of uncertainty for so many theaters, I can understand why the Board forced him to resign.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I can understand it, and yeah, I did hear about that case, but it makes me think: If I worked at a conservative company, say, and I contributed to a pro-choice cause, should they ask for my resignation? Is that even legal? Is there anything that would stop that company from firing me? And mightn't that lead me to stop contributing, or to only contribute anonymously? Is that a good thing?

This is always the problem with me and activism; I can't help turning things upside down.

[cricketnyc.livejournal.com]

I think that had he not included his employer information, it might not have been an issue. But by including that information, he dragged his employer into this mess, and I think they had a right to dismiss him for that reason. I think it also depends on your role within the company. He was the artistic director, and pretty much the guy in charge. If the VP of GMHC made a similar donation, I could see that ruffling feathers, but someone whose name is not immediately associated with the company (or who did not include their employer information) would not necessarily get the same backlash.

In other words, to use your example, if you worked for that company, I'm not sure they'd have grounds to fire you for a donation to an organization of your choice, but if you ran that company, I could see there being enough public backlash that you might be asked to step down.

[lillijulianne.livejournal.com]

i do understand this. my son had a wonderful teacher in confirmation class, a lawyer, married, kids, about age 60. i noticed he wasn't on the roster anymore, but he doesn't live right here, and works in my hometown, so i figured it just got to be too much on his schedule. well, my mother knows him through church stuff down there, and when last she saw him (he was wearing an obama hat) he told her he was asked to step down because he said he thought gay marriage should be legal. not celebrated in the church, mind you, just legal in the us. so the kids in the parish are being deprived of a caring, learned, dynamic teacher, he's being deprived of working with them, this sucks all round, and we're not even talking about somebody's livelihood.

and yet i feel that there's a huge difference between the ground troops and the top brass in ANY situation. it would make more sense to me, however vehemently i disagree, if he were a cardinal and the vatican censured him. the closer you are to the top, the more you have control of goals and missions and finances and policy in any organization, the more i think there's some legitimacy in asking you to hew to its philosophy. are gay rights part of the philosophy of a musical theater group? it seems like they should be. of course i think egalitarianism should be part of the philosophy of the church, but that's another headache.