Extremism Extinguished: Calif. Judge Strikes Down Proposal That Would Have Punished Gays With Death | Americans United

A state court in California has put a stop to a vicious and vindictive ballot initiative that would have allowed gays in California to be executed. (You read that right – executed.)

The proposal was the height of Religious Right extremism. Known as the “Sodomite Suppression Act,” the ballot initiative would have permitted the murder of people based solely on their sexual orientation. It described homosexuality as “a monstrous evil,” and it recommended that gays be killed by “bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

It would have also banned the distribution of “sodomistic propaganda,” prohibited LGBT people from holding public office, and if passed, could not have been overturned by anything but a quorum of the California Supreme Court. The extreme language of the proposal quickly earned comparisons to Uganda’s infamous “kill the gays” bill, and Russia’s ban on “gay propaganda.”

So hateful was the proposal that in March, California Attorney General Kamala Harris refused to even certify it.
Then in a ruling released this week, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei put the disgraceful initiative to rest. He said there was simply no point in even going through the motions on this one because the proposal was “patently unconstitutional” and forcing Harris to allow it to go forward would be “inappropriate, waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public and tend to mislead the electorate.” 

Extremism Extinguished: Calif. Judge Strikes Down Proposal That Would Have Punished Gays With Death | Americans United