Huntington Beach attorney Matthew Gregory McLaughlin's proposed California voter initiative that would authorize the murder of gays and lesbians by “bullets to the head” or “any other convenient method” will not be on the November 2016 ballot–or any ballot in the future, apparently.
]
Huntington Beach Attorney Matt McLaughlin Files Ballot Measure Requiring Gays To Be Shot
Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Raymond M. Cadei, responding to a request from state Attorney General Kamala Harris, ruled Monday that she can block the so-called Sodomite Suppression Act because it is “patently unconstitutional on its face.”
Requiring the AG to advance McLaughlin's proposed proposition to the signature-gathering phase “would be inappropriate, waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public and tend to mislead the electorate,” Cadei writes in his ruling.
The Los Angeles Times reports the ruling bars the intended initiative from any ballot, which no doubt pleases Harris.
“This proposed act is the product of bigotry, seeks to promote violence, is patently unconstitutional and has no place in a civil society,” she says in a statement released Tuesday.
Besides firing squads for gays and lesbians, McLaughlin's law would have demanded that anyone who espouses any feelings toward homosexuals except sheer, utter hatred be fined $1 million, clapped in prison for 10 years, and then thrown out of the state.
The fact that McLaughlin somehow managed to pass the state bar–and should presumably understand the law–alarmed so many that an online petition was launched calling for his disbarment.
But keeping his license to practice law may have been easier than qualifying for the state ballot. He and his supporters would have had to collect more than 365,000 signatures in 180 days, a high bar even for well-financed efforts.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.