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The Danger Of Policing Donor Lists

Erin Manning has a good comment on the most recent political donors thread: I think a sort of compromise could be hammered out, if we lived in a sane and reasonable society. That compromise would include protecting small donors especially on campaigns directly involving issues, but not protecting large donors or *any* donor contributing directly […]

Erin Manning has a good comment on the most recent political donors thread:

I think a sort of compromise could be hammered out, if we lived in a sane and reasonable society. That compromise would include protecting small donors especially on campaigns directly involving issues, but not protecting large donors or *any* donor contributing directly to a political campaign (because, I’m sorry, but if it ever becomes a personal liability for a person to have been known to have contributed to the Senate campaign of John Smith or Jane Doe, we’re not really a democracy any more, and we might as well quit pretending). However, I am not sanguine, as we no longer live in a sane and reasonable society.

If people would (as others have said) look at other issues beside the gay agenda, I think they’d quickly realize how dangerous this trend is. Say there’s a referendum in your town to raise taxes to build a new school. You homeschool, you think taxes in your town are high enough, and not only do you vote against the referendum, you give $100 to the “No on New School” campaign. Well, your boss calls you in and tells you his wife, mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother are or were all teachers, and you’re clearly against education, and he’s not comfortable having a homeschooling anti-education bigot on his team…

Is that just fine? What if it’s the other way around–what if the boss has no kids and hates taxes and fires you for giving money to the “Yes on New School” campaign? Or what if you vote against the new school, and your child’s application to a local college is turned down on the grounds that his parents are anti-education?

Do we really want the political opinions and leanings of people who give a few hundred dollars, or even a thousand dollars, to advance a cause they believe in or stand against something they don’t, to be open for this kind of micromanaging public scrutiny? In the Internet age? When a donation you made years ago and have practically forgotten about could be dredged up and used against you at any moment?

I remember working for a pro-life ballot initiative in Washington State, years ago (sadly, it did not pass; there’s almost nothing the highly unchurched people of WA value more than disposable fetuses–human, of course; it’s horrifying to many of them if an animal fetus dies). But a woman and her daughter who seemed vaguely sort of pro-choice-ish but were willing to listen and kind of open to persuasion ended up signing the petition to get the initiative on the ballot. If they had made a contribution to our efforts (I can’t remember if they did), should that momentary decision by people who would never have described themselves as pro-life be allowed to come back years later and ruin their lives–as, in WA, it might very well?

Many people here are too busy being caught up in the gay marriage red herring to concentrate on the real problem: in an age when personal information about everyone you meet is distressingly easy to come by, should we mandate the full disclosure of even tiny sums of money paid to advance a political *issue,* not a candidate? I don’t think so, because I think the end result of that would be the same result as our total failure to pass meaningful campaign finance reform (note: I’m conservative, not Republican), which is the continued alienation of the average citizen from the processes of governance, including (if not especially) voting and participating in elections.

 

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