Legal Groups File Brief Disputing False Claims of Harassment
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court today, the nation’s leading LGBT legal organizations, Lambda Legal, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) – together with the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force – joined the State of Washington and others in defending open government laws requiring public disclosure of the names of voters who sign petitions supporting state ballot initiatives. In particular, this brief refutes the false claims presented to the Supreme Court in this and other cases that individuals who support anti-gay initiatives have been subjected to “systematic intimidation” by the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
In Doe v. Reed, anti-gay groups are asking the Supreme Court to overturn a decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordering the release of the names of 138,000 people who signed petitions supporting a ballot initiative to repeal basic protections for same-sex couples in Washington State. In November 2009, Washington voters rejected this attempt – Referendum 71—and preserved the state’s domestic partnership law. Under Washington’s Public Records Act, the signatures on referendum petitions are public in order to prevent fraud and protect the integrity of the lawmaking process. The anti-gay groups are seeking to strike down Washington’s law, claiming that supporters of anti-gay ballot campaigns would be exposed to harassment and intimidation by the LGBT community if their names were made public.
The amicus brief submitted by the LGBT legal groups argues that it is the lesbian and gay community, not its opponents, that continues to suffer serious violence, harassment, and discrimination, along with a 30-year barrage of ballot petitions aimed at stripping LGBT people and other minority groups of basic protections. The brief also attacks the notion of an alleged organized campaign of harassment and intimidation against supporters of anti-gay ballot initiatives, calling into question legal statements and press accounts cited by anti-gay groups (details available at www.glad.org/doe-v-reed).
“There is no credible evidence that individuals who signed petitions to put Referendum 71 on the ballot were subjected to any harassment,” says Gary Buseck, Legal Director of GLAD. “Petitioners have taken a handful of isolated incidents – serious if true but also endemic to hard-fought political campaigns - and attempted to magnify them into a coordinated campaign that simply does not exist by joining them with any array of trivial grievances and feelings of discomfort when lesbians and gay men responded to the ballot attack with constitutionally protected speech.”