Thursday, November 14, 2013

The Tyranny Of The Many Against The Few

Or why I am against ballot initiatives.

Exhibit A: California

Do you know how many ballot initiatives there were in California in the 2008 elections? 21!

Do you know the total cost of all those ballot initiatives? $27,826,947! On Proposition 8 the state spent $882,900 and that does not include the cost of the legal challenge that went to the Supreme Court. The lobbying efforts on both sides of the proposition spent a total of 83 million dollars! And most of that came from outside the state.
Transgender law's foes may succeed in ballot drive
SF Gate
By Carla Marinucci
November 11, 2013

A conservative coalition says it has submitted enough signatures to block a state law that would force schools to let transgender students play on sports teams and use restrooms and other facilities that match their gender orientation.

If the state verifies that enough of the signatures are from registered voters, the law will not take effect as scheduled Jan. 1 and will go on the November 2014 ballot. The result could be an election fight reminiscent of Proposition 8, the 2008 constitutional amendment that outlawed same-sex marriage until federal courts overturned it.
It took 144 years for women to get the right to vote! Only 13 states passed a Women’s Suffrage ballot initiative, but some of those took multiply attempts before they passed, in Oregon, it took six attempts before it passed. However, 16 states did not pass the Women’s Suffrage voter initiatives.

It took Congress to pass an amendment and the states’ legislative bodies to vote to make women’s right to vote the law of the land. If Congress didn’t pass the amendment we would have been a hodgepodge of state allowing women to vote.

Back when our founding fathers were writing the Constitution they realized that they needed something to protect the rights of minorities from the tyranny of the majority and they came up with the Bill of Rights but it was limited. When they wrote Bill of Rights, women and blacks were still property. When a woman married she gave over all the rights that she had to her husband. It took an act of Congress to give blacks their rights and it took another act of Congress for women to get their right to vote.

Do you think blacks would ever have their equal rights is it was left to ballot initiatives, do you think that the southern states would ever have passed equal rights laws for them?

When I wrote about this in 2008 when a ballot question here in Connecticut asked if we wanted to have ballot initiatives here, someone left a comment on my blog. He wrote,
I'm sorry that gays and others have been targeted by intolerant abusers of the initiative process. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater!
My reply in the next blog was,
That statement reeks of “Male Power” it comes from people who have never experienced what it is like to be discriminated against. It comes from people who have never been told that “Your kind are not welcome here.” as has happened here in Connecticut just recently when a trans-woman was asked to leave a bar because she was upsetting the customers. It comes from people who have never been fired from a job because they are different.
If you want ballot initiatives, then stick to budget items or issues that do not affect people’s human rights, the right to be judged on your work not who you are, the right to live where you want, the right to be treated as an equal and most of all the right to determine who you are.

When I was at the hearings for the gender inclusive anti-discrimination bill there was one person who spoke against the bill and what he said made an impression on me. After he testified against the bill he was getting up, but then sat down and said that when he first came to the hearing he expected it to be confrontational but he was surprised at the questions asked by the legislators were thoughtful. He said that it was a good educational experience for him.

When the people vote on the ballot question will they understand what the law really does or will they get their information from 30 second sound bites about the horrors of boys in the girls’ bathroom. Will the far right fear permeate over to the voters? Will they take the time to learn about AB1266 and what it means to individuals who are transgender? Or will they decide when they walk in to the voting booth on how to vote and the issue that for some could mean life or death?

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