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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

‘Kill the Gays’ Proposition Put Out of Its Misery

SACRAMENTO (CN) - A Superior Court judge on Tuesday killed a ballot initiative from a California lawyer who proposed executing gays and lesbians.

Sacramento Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei called the "Sodomite Suppression Act" unconstitutional and said that spending any government time or money on it would "waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public and tend to mislead the electorate."

Attorney General Kamala Harris sued the act's author in March, asking a judge to relieve her from her duty to prepare the proposition for ballot circulation.

The author, Orange County attorney Matt McLaughlin, who has not spoken with reporters since he filed the initiative, would have needed 365,000 signatures to advance his mission of eliminating gay scourge in California.

Harris applauded Cadei's decision and said she will continue to fight against intolerance and bigotry.

"This proposed act is the product of bigotry, seeks to promote violence, is patently unconstitutional and has no place in a civil society," Harris said in a statement.

McLaughlin failed to appear or defend his initiative in court and has been unresponsive to the growing media coverage since he filed the measure in February.

McLaughlin paid a $200 filing fee - a fee that hasn't changed in California since 1940 - and proposed a law calling for the murder of gays by "bullets to the head or by any other convenient method."

Politicians, civil liberty groups and LGBT rights activists have called on the State Bar to investigate and disbar McLaughlin, who has introduced ballot initiatives in the past, including 2004, when he suggested that King James Bibles be mandatory in public school classes.

In response to McLaughlin's abuse of the ballot initiative process, a bill increasing the filing fee from $200 to $2,500 is advancing through the Legislature.

Democrats introduced AB 1100 and the Assembly in May approved it by 46-24 vote, sending it to the Senate, where it awaits a hearing in the Appropriations Committee.

State politicians supported the judge's ruling.

" LGBT Californians shouldn't be threatened. Hope this is [the] last time our system is abused [to] promote [the] political equivalent of toxic waste," Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins tweeted.

McLaughlin did not return several calls for comment on the initiative and the Tuesday ruling.

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