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

[folk.livejournal.com]

I think I understand your concerns on this. To me, much of it is the general concern I have about mashups: people's expectations of privacy. It was one thing when you could WHOIS a website and find out that the owner of SugarTowerAlley (say) lived at 123 Snuffleberry Hill, Buttfuck, EG, because the barriers to entry to actually *doing* anything about it were high and numerous. Now, the barriers are lower because I can Google Streetview number 123 and see the white Mazda parked outside, and that just skeeves me the hell out.

But part of me says to the people who are worried about being harassed because they donated to Prop 8: boo fucking hoo. LGBT people are harassed, attacked, assaulted, raped and killed every day. Maybe not contribute to a cause that legitimises the discrimination that leads to that before crying about hypothetical straw-boogey-men.

For apart from that despicable incident of graffiti on a SF Catholic church (one that, of course, had a fairly pro-gay congregation, although that does strike me as nearly as ridiculous as a pro-Jew Klan rally) I haven't read a lot of reports of violence from the "gay side".

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Well, you know, I understand the boo fucking hoo; I think that's why I included the example of my father. I get that people might think he should be shot for being on that registry, but that isn't what the court said, and in any case I shouldn't have had to worry about my mother getting her house burned down.

But all that said, what I'm actually worried about is the pro-life types, who absolutely do have a history of violence. When I was living in Philadelphia in the early 90s Operation Rescue was targeting Pennsylvania, and the whole city was sort of a mess of protesters and escorts and craziness. Do I want to be harassed by some insane pro-lifer who realizes they live around the corner from a donor to a pro-choice ballot issue? Not so much, no. And if I feel uncomfortable, imagine how other people feel.

In general, I don't want the uptick in participation that we saw in the 2008 campaign to go away because people are starting to worry that if they work for a company that might have different political views than they do, they could be fired for contributing to the wrong effort. It's very easy to go back to the red scare days, incredibly easy to intimidate people out of participation, so that the wealthy man is the only one who can afford to give, not because he has more money, but because he needn't fear for his job.

I guess, let's take the actual cause out of the equation. Never mind that you're angry that these people contributed to a cause that hurts you. What if they had contributed to a cause you agreed with, but that many people don't, like abortion? What happens then? Should that guy at the playhouse have lost his job? Part of me understands why the board asked him to resign, and part of me is deeply worried about where that sort of thing can lead.

[folk.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on the sex offenders' registry, BTW: I know people on it for things like statutory rape when one partner was 18 and one 17 in the UK before the age of consent was equalised, that kind of thing. And, yes, very often innocent families and friends are tarred with the brush.

I do take your point about crazy pro-lifers and PP and all, but are PP contribution records public? In a way, we've been dealing with this in the UK, where the BNP had its membership lists leaked to wikileaks, and so people have been mashing up "where is the BNP?" with Google Maps and the addresses. And I feel kind of skeevy about that, because BNP members are banned from the police and various other jobs, but it's generally a private organisation, and I don't want some foolish old retired guy to get a beating, you know?

For some things, we have protected classes. I'm much more skeeved by the idea of a list on this based on any of those. (Race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) But I think that political donations are public for a reason, because your representatives and mine decided it was important that everybody know who contributed to registered political organisations. I think I'm okay with the tradeoff of people being concerned about contributing to controversial causes.

(I do think that it was ethically just that Scott Eckerd lost his job at the playhouse in Sacramento, because being anti-gay is not a legally protected class, and I am entirely ethically skeeved by him profiting off the backs of those whose he paid to diminish.)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

But the question is: is being pro-choice a protected class? And if not PP, then on any of the ballot initiatives regarding abortion that went up in various states this past election season?

I think it's the addresses that worry me more than anything. And I may be pre-wondering about a chilling effect, but a chilling effect would really, really suck.

The Sacramento thing is skeevy, but where does that sort of thing end? That's certainly what I worry about.

[folk.livejournal.com]

See, I get why you're concerned; I just think that the tradeoff of chilling effect vs. open political process is worth it.

I dislike slippery slope arguments, but in this case? If we want people to be able to not get fired for personal stuff, then we need to enact employment protection laws. Even then, I'm pretty sure he could still be fired for bringing the company into disrepute, and standard contracts would start to include 'no disrepute' clauses.