California AG Kamala Harris
A proposed ballot measure calling for gay people to be put to death for the “abominable crime against nature known as buggery, called also sodomy” has been thrown put by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Raymond M. Cadei, according to Patheos.com, the Progressive Secular Humanist website.
Huntington Beach lawyer Matthew McLaughlin filed the measure, asking that it be placed on the California state ballot for a vote. Titled “The Sodomite Suppression Act,” the proposed law required that gays be put to death by “bullets to the head” or “any other convenient method.”
California Attorney General Kamala Harris asked the court to throw out McLaughlin’s ballot measure. Judge Cadei did just that, ruling that it was “patently unconstitutional on its face.”
Without his ruling, Harris would have been legally required to proceed with putting the process of putting the measure on the ballot. Cadei, however, said advancing the proposal to the signature-gathering phase “would be inappropriate, waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public and tend to mislead the electorate.”
Harris, in a written statement, called the proposal “the product of bigotry, [that] seeks to promote violence, is patently unconstitutional and has no place in a civil society.”
Shortly after McLaughlin originally filed his proposed ballot measure, activist and author Charlotte Laws filed the “Intolerant Jackass Act,” which, if approved by voters, would require anyone who proposes measures calling for the death of gay people to attend monthly sensitivity training and to donate $5,000 to “a pro-gay or pro-lesbian organization.”
