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By bullets to the head or by any other convenient method

So, that’s good, I guess, except it should never have in the first place so it’s not so much good as…no, right, of course not, why would you even ask.

A judge has relieved California’s attorney general of the duty to process a proposed ballot initiative that advocated killing anyone who engages in gay sex.

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei ruled late Monday that the so-called Sodomite Suppression Act was patently unconstitutional.

The what? Ok I should have looked at this in March. The  Sodomite Suppression Act…

An Orange County, Calif., attorney has filed a proposed ballot measure with the California Attorney General’s office asking voters to criminalize homosexuality in the state and impose a death penalty sentence.

The filing, submitted along with the required fee of $200, will allow attorney Matthew G. McLaughlin to begin the process of collecting the approximately 365,000 signatures needed to put the measure before California voters on an upcoming ballot, reports Raw Story.

But now that’s not going to happen. Good. Can we get attorny Matthew G McLaughlin to leave the country and relocate to an uninhabited island in the Pacific?

Under McLaughlin’s proposal, “The abominable crime against nature known as buggery, called also sodomy, is a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha.”

“The People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

Full text of the proposal is here.

An island with a harsh climate and an active volcano?

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Comments

  1. Blanche Quizno says

    I did a quick search on this numbskull, since I, too, live in CA and don’t like him besmirching our fair state’s reputation for progressiveness:

    The former boss of the mysterious California lawyer behind a state ballot proposal that would mandate executing gay people said on Tuesday that he hopes the public will show no mercy on his old employee.

    “Go after him with a knife and fork,” Bruce C. Bridgman told TPM when reached by phone.

    Now semi-retired, Birdgman heads a firm, The Law Office of Bruce C. Bridgman, that in 2002 briefly employed Matthew Gregory McLaughlin, who has been unreachable since news broke of his now-infamous “Sodomite Suppression Act.”

    “My own personal opinion here is that he has crossed the line, between free speech and advocating illegal conduct,” Bridgman, a former deputy district attorney for both Los Angeles and Orange County, told TPM.

    Despite his outrageous proposal, McLaughlin’s past remains foggy: Aside from another failed ballot initiative in 2004 — lobbying to make the Bible required reading in public schools — he hasn’t made much of a splash in Orange County since he began his practice in 1998. The State Bar website says that his license remains active. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/matthew-gregory-mclaughlin-employer-bridgman

    THERE it is! Crazy-ass Christians may try to hide their crazy, but like doggie doo under a rosebush, you can still smell it.

  2. Blanche Quizno says

    How’s about he relocates to an underwater island like Graham Island off Sicily?

  4. says

    Can we get attorny Matthew G McLaughlin to leave the country and relocate to an uninhabited island in the Pacific?

    I can’t believe you’re preaching a crusade against McLaughlin!! It’s a veritable witch hunt! No, wait, it’s a nuclear fucking armageddon!!

    Oops, sorry, apparently someone spiked my coffee with LSD and I thought I was an alternate-universe Richard Dawkins.

  5. says

    An island with a harsh climate and an active volcano?

    Baker Island would suffice. No volcanoes, but it’s US territory. Or Wake Island if solitary is too cruel – it’s still US territory, its but residents are not considered US citizens.

  6. StevoR says

    Apart from everything else so horribly, horribly wrong with McLaughlin’’s vile hateful proposal, it semes he’s yet another Christian who is ignorant what Sodom and Gomorrha’s actual crime really was – inhospitable cruelty to strangers and arrogant refusal to help the worse off :

    In fact, the Bible itself expressly describes the sin of Sodom elsewhere as radical inhospitality. According to the prophet Ezekiel, the real “guilt” of the Sodomites was the fact that, although they had “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease,” they “did not aid the poor and needy” and were “haughty” (Ezekiel 16:49-50). Similarly, the Letter to the Hebrews warns Christians by alluding to the true sin of the Sodomites as inhospitality: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2).

    Source : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-patrick-s-cheng-phd/what-was-the-real-sin-of_b_543996.html

    Among other places. See also the Bible itself :

    49″Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had arrogance, abundant food and careless ease, but she did not help the poor and needy.

    – Ezekial 16:49.

    There’s extra detail in the traditional and varied Jewish accounts too :

    Rabbinic writings affirm that the Sodomites also committed economic crimes, blasphemy and bloodshed.[37] One of the worst was to give money or even gold ingots to beggars, after inscribing their names on them, and then subsequently refusing to sell them food. The unfortunate stranger would end up starving and after his death, the people who gave him the money would reclaim it.

    A rabbinic tradition, described in the Mishnah, postulates that the sin of Sodom was related to property: Sodomites believed that “what is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours” (Abot), which is interpreted as a lack of compassion. Another rabbinic tradition is that these two wealthy cities treated visitors in a sadistic fashion. One major crime done to strangers was almost identical to that of Procrustes in Greek mythology. This would be the story of the “bed” that guests to Sodom were forced to sleep in: if they were too short they were stretched to fit it, and if they were too tall, they were cut up (indeed, in Hebrew and Yiddish, the corresponding term for a Procrustean bed is a “Sodom bed”).

    In another incident, Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, went to visit Lot in Sodom and got in a dispute with a Sodomite over a beggar, and was hit in the forehead with a stone, making him bleed. The Sodomite demanded Eliezer pay him for the service of bloodletting, and a Sodomite judge sided with the Sodomite. Eliezer then struck the judge in the forehead with a stone and asked the judge to pay the Sodomite.

    The Talmud and the Sefer haYashar (midrash) also recount two incidents of a young girl (one involved Lot’s daughter Paltith) who gave some bread to a poor man who had entered the city. When the townspeople discovered their acts of kindness, they burned Paltith and smeared the other girl’s body with honey and hung her from the city wall until she was eaten by bees. (Sanhedrin 109a.) It is this gruesome event, and her scream in particular, the Talmud concludes, that are alluded to in the verse that heralds the city’s destruction: “So[38] said, ‘Because the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah has become great, and because their sin has been very grave, I will descend and see…'”[Gen 18:20-21]

    Source : Wikipedia – Sodom_and_Gomorrah#Jewish

    This book the fool claims to worship or at least know and respect, it does not say what he think it says!

  7. says

    It’s the right call, but I’m not sure I like the precedent of giving the government a form of prior restraint on initiatives: the whole point of the initiative process is to create an avenue for legislation when the Legislature refuses to take action.

  8. alona says

    Or maybe one of those Japanese islands of cats, but only if it’s the version of Haruki Murakami, where the cats are hostile to intruder humans.

  9. khms says

    #7 Gregory in Seattle

    It’s the right call, but I’m not sure I like the precedent of giving the government a form of prior restraint on initiatives: the whole point of the initiative process is to create an avenue for legislation when the Legislature refuses to take action.

    First, judges are (at least supposed to be) independent; and second, the whole point of the concept of the constitutionality of law is to make certain kinds of law impossible, no matter what the majority wants.

    If the asshole in question thinks the judge should have decided differently, he’s a lawyer and ought to know how this works – work through higher courts up until the Supreme Court. If he has any doubt about what the SC would say about this.

    And if anyone wants to change the constitution so this initiative would no longer be invalid, I believe said constitution also spells out how that can be done.

  10. quixote says

    (Gregory #7, you’re missing the whole point of having a rule of law. Basic rights, such as not being killed for not committing a crime, are not subject to majority rule.)

    As for the religious nut, what have you got against islands, Ophelia? Ship him to an asteroid.

  11. screechymonkey says

    I do, however, sort of appreciate the reference to “in fear of God.” It’s nice when Christians just come out and admit that their “morality” is based on the principle that might makes right and God is the mightiest of all, as opposed to hiding behind protestations that it’s all about loooove.

  15. cuervocuero says

    From the ‘actual’ meaning of being a Sodomite, it sounds like where Galt’s Gulch was located. Sodomolibiterians?

    But also, too. That ‘clever’ piece of legal shenanigans is just *one* of the results of having deeply religious ‘university’ campuses allowed to have accredited legal college standing.

    Which is why, right now in Canada, several provincial law societies are reviewing or refusing accreditation of Trinity Western University law students that will be attending its new program starting in 2016. Seems they have a bone to pick with Trinity’s mandatory ‘community covenant’ for students that demands religious doctrine trumps equal protection for sexualities under Canadian law.

    Trinity is of course, thrilled to be Christian martyrs and threatening to sue them all in the name of ‘one man one woman no sex except inside a marriage they approve’…I mean, in the name of religious freeeeedum.

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