R-71 foes’ tactics put open records at risk
THE NEWS TRIBUNE
If fair-minded Washingtonians need another reason to resent a plan to “out” those who signed petitions for Referendum 71, the legal backlash brewing in a Tacoma courtroom is a prime candidate.
The state’s open records law is now caught up in a war between gay rights activists who would use public disclosure as a bludgeon and conservative groups who argue that transparency is a threat to political speech.
The fight raged elsewhere before the Washington Legislature passed its “everything but marriage” bill this year, extending many benefits and obligations to gay couples.
But now battle has come to Washington, thanks largely to WhoSigned.Org’s plans to expose R-71 supporters.
Initiative and referendum petitions are public records and routinely released. (Last month, the National Education Association requested and received copies of petitions for Initiative 1033, which could put a crimp in education funding.)
But WhoSigned.Org wants to take public disclosure a step further: by using the petitions to compile an online database of the names and addresses of R-71 signatories.
The threat didn’t discourage people from signing the petitions as well as WhoSigned.Org organizers might have hoped – R-71 backers turned in 137,000 signatures last week, theoretically enough to qualify for the November ballot.
But WhoSigned.Org organizers were still hoping people would use the database to seek out R-71 signers for “uncomfortable conversations.”
R-71’s sponsor, Protect Marriage Washington, intervened last week and asked a federal court to block the petitions’ release.
James Bopp Jr. – a lawyer from Indiana who filed a similar lawsuit in California following the release and online publication of names of donors to the Proposition 8 campaign – argued that Washington’s public records law runs afoul of individuals’ First Amendment rights. Releasing referendum petitions has a chilling effect on political speech, he said, and that’s especially true when “it is reasonably probable that those exercising their First Amendment rights would be subjected to threats and harassment.”
The argument must have impressed U.S. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle at least a little, hence the temporary restraining order against the petitions’ release that he signed last week.
That’s far from the last word. Settle will consider the case in full next month. The state Attorney General’s office – which, having been presented with 500 pages of legal filings shortly before last week’s hearing, didn’t have time to mount a defense – promises to vigorously defend the state’s public disclosure laws.
As it should. In June, we warned that WhoSigned.Org’s tactics could backfire by angering voters who might not have otherwise signed a petition to repeal rights for gay partners. Now the heavy-handed strategy also poses a threat – however remote it may be – to this state’s proud tradition of open government.
