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

[moony]

A few months ago, a player of Warcraft threatened to come to Austin (where Blizzard's call center is located) and go "Virginia Tech" on us, because we didn't give him something he wanted. Something that didn't actually exist, that wasn't more than just pixels on a screen.

If we live in a world where someone thinks it's okay to threaten to take someone's life over a video game, I can completely understand being a little iffy about controversial donor names and addresses being made public. No matter what side you're on, there are those who think violence is the best response to something you don't agree with. As much as I loathe the people who donated toward Prop 8, I wish them no harm and I worry about retribution toward them and their familes.

Companies, however, I will happy boycott and protest them.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

And certainly there are pro-life groups that have a history of violence against private citizens. They've mostly concentrated on intimidating physicians, but who's to say they might not take on donor lists? It's worrysome.