SACRAMENTO-
California Attorney General Kamala Harris is going to court to stop the so-called “Sodomite Suppression Act.”
The act was lawfully submitted to California’s Attorney General as a ballot initiative idea almost a month ago. Then, legal experts said there was no way Harris couldn’t push it forward to the voters, but she and many in the community are backing another course of action.
“Back in the 80s, if you came out, you were basically taking your life in your hands. There was that feeling you could get killed. Beaten,” Donald Bentz.
As a proud gay man, Bentz feels a proposed ballot initiative is trying to create a terrible time warp in California – an initiative authorizing the killing of gays with quote “bullets to the head.”
As the executive director of Sacramento’s LGBT Community center Bentz fears for a whole class of people being made to feel that their love could cost a life.
“It is terrifying,” he said.
Harris asked a judge Wednesday for the kind of declaratory relief that could absolve her of having to write a title and summary for the proposed “Sodomite Suppression Act,” as lawfully submitted by Huntington Beach attorney Matthew McLaughlin.
In a statement on her website Harris says it “threatens public safety, is patently unconstitutional, utterly reprehensible and has no place in a civil society.”
And it would have a very difficult place in her democratic run for U.S. Senate with a large gay constituency, making for her unique AG move.
“There have been some times when they’ve had to defend the actual summary or title that they’ve written,” FOX40’s Political Analyst Gary Dietrich said. “But to actually say, ‘I don’t want to write one, period?’ I think that’s the first time any of us around the Capitol can remember that.”
Since last week, when FOX40 first reported on Carol Dahman’s change.org petition to disbar McLaughlin for creating this murderous proposal, the number of those signed on has risen from 4,000 to more than 47,000.
She applauds what Harris is trying to do.
“He is sanctioned and licensed to uphold the law, not to advocate for the murder of innocent people,” Dahman, a Sacramento political consultant, told FOX40.
Matthew McLaughlin paid the required $200 to submit his act as an initiative idea.
A bill has been proposed to raise that fee to $8,000 in an effort to quell outrageous or frivolous filings.
Some say that change would also quell free speech.
