There is a right to free speech. It’s guaranteed under the Constitution, and no one questions it.
But speaking freely can sometimes have consequences.
Case in point, National Organization for Marriage, which ran a successful campaign in 2009 to overturn gay marriage in Maine. NOM was just fined more than $50,000 for failing to disclose its donors’ names in that campaign, as required by Maine campaign law.
People were willing to pay for their bigotry, it seems, but they didn’t want anyone to know they were willing to pay for their bigotry. NOM was trying to protect their large donor base … people who gave $5,000 or more to defeat marriage equality in Maine.
And only three years later, voters reversed themselves and made same sex marriage legal in Maine again.
The Ethics Commission will vote May 28 on the final investigative report, which was released Monday. In addition to the fine, NOM will be required to register with the state and comply with campaign finance law here that requires that the names of donors and groups that gave to the campaign be made public.
NOM says that it’s protecting its donors civil rights, and that they could be subject to harrassment and reprisals if their names are made public.
We’re sorry, that’s the price of free speech.
What is really happening is that NOM realizes that if the names of their donors are made public, their donor base would dry up.
In California in 2008, NOM tried to shield its big donors, but eventually, their names and organizations were posted on the California Secretary of State’s website. One of those big donors was a political action committee controlled by Mitt Romney. Romney was running for the Republican nomination at the time, and gave $10,000 to NOM via his Free and Strong America PAC in Alabama, taking advantage of that state’s notoriously lax campaign laws to make a donation under the radar.
You’d almost think they believed they were doing something shameful.
There has been considerable fallout from the California donations. Brendan Eich of Mozilla was forced to step down when his name surfaced on a donor list; he is not the only one to lose a job or be socially ostracized for his position.
But remember, everyone has the right to free speech. People who decide to donate funds to a campaign to strip other people of human rights have the right to free speech, but so do the people who refuse to let them get away with it in the shadows.
We fully expect that the Ethics Commission will allow the rest of us to be able to exercise our free speech rights, by releasing the names of those who exercised theirs in 2009 at last.
We hope they’ll do it on the 28th.
No one should be able to give money to any campaign without disclosure.
We don’t believe in special rights. Not for marriage, and not for bigoted political “speech.”
And if organizations like NOM have difficulty getting donors when they are forced to disclose their names, perhaps that should tell them something about the position they’ve taken.
In the meantime, we hope donors will think twice, and then think again, if they don’t want their names associated with an group like the National Organization for Marriage.
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