NOM SVU fails to con CA judge into granting special privileges exempting it from campaign disclosure

England

Igor Volsky writes in ThinkProgress that the attempt in California by ProtectMarriage and the National Organization for Marriage to gain exemption from campaign finance disclosure laws was swatted down rather dismissively by U.S. District Judge Morrison England Jr., who ruled that the groups’ “limited evidence is simply insufficient” to support their claim “that disclosure of contributors’ names will lead to threats, harassment or reprisals.”

Apparently Judge England found NOM's attempt to compare its "oppression" to the historical oppression of blacks to be as ridiculous as NOM thinks comparing black to gay oppression is. How ironic. How rich. How fitting.

In his opinion filed on Friday, England dismissed the groups’ efforts to compare themselves to such historically maligned organizations as the NAACP and ruled that only “small, persecuted groups whose very existence depended on some manner of anonymity”:

     England argued that even if ProtectMarriage and NOM fit into the historical circumstances of the NAACP, they “would need evidence of thousands of acts of reprisals, threats or harassment, spanning much more than the short period of time covering California’s ballot-initiative process to prove contributors to such a massive group are entitled to anonymity.” He added: “Plaintiffs’ contributors’ names were actually disclosed years ago and yet Plaintiffs have produced almost no evidence of any ramifications suffered in the almost three years post-disclosure.” “Accordingly, from a practical perspective, it makes no sense to buy in to the argument that disclosure may result in repercussions when there is simply no real evidence in the record that such repercussions actually did occur in the past three years. Plaintiffs’ evidence is, quite simply, stale.”