Proposition 8 Thuggery

When eerily convenient Prop-8 directories and Google maps were released earlier this winter, accounts of threats and thuggery began accumulating. But how much of this was real intimidation from the left, and how much was the pretense of doom from the right?

Writing in the latest issue of the Weekly Standard , painter and journalist Maureen Mullarkey relates the aftermath of her donation to the Yes for Marriage campaign—reporters appearing in her driveway for late-night interviews, a barrage of invective and profanity in her mailbox, slanderous and enraged articles. And it kept coming. Mullarkey writes:

It is one thing to read hate-filled mail on a computer screen. It is something else to have it in hand. At the end of the week, when it started coming to my house, I filed a police report.

Until now, donating to a cause did not open private citizens to a battery of invective and jackboot tactics. While celebrities sport their moral vanity with white ribbons, thousands of ordinary Americans who donated to Prop 8 are being targeted in a vile campaign of intimidation for having supported a measure that, in essence, ratified the crucial relation between marriage and childbearing. Some in California have lost their jobs over it; others worry about an unhinged stranger showing up at the door.

Who was it who predicted that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would come in the guise of liberal egalitarianism?

It’s a strange thing when threats and thuggery masquerade under the name of tolerance and democratic freedom.