'Intolerant Jackass' Act Counters 'Shoot Gays' Act

Advocating murder would be punished with sensitivity training
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 24, 2015 3:35 AM CDT
'Intolerant Jackass' Act Counters 'Shoot Gays' Act
Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general, speaks at the UCLA Law Review Symposium earlier this year.   (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Activist Charlotte Laws says she is "fighting fire with fire"—and fighting an intolerant jackass with the Intolerant Jackass Act. With California Attorney General Kamala Harris unable to halt the progress of lawyer Matt McLaughlin's Sodomite Suppression Act ballot initiative, which calls for homosexuality to be punished by "bullets to the head," Laws' lighthearted counter-initiative calls for anyone proposing a ballot measure involving killing gay people to be punished with a year of sensitivity training and a hefty donation to a gay rights group, Slate reports. The measure mocks the language of McLaughlin's initiative, which describes homosexuality as an "abominable crime."

Laws, who like McLaughlin only had to pay a $200 fee to file the initiative, tells Slate that the measure is a way to show that most Californians "don't agree with something as incendiary and hateful as what this one attorney proposed." McLaughlin's deranged initiative appears bound for the signature-gathering phase, though the state Supreme Court would be certain to step in to keep it off the ballot even if he found the necessary 365,000 signatures, the Guardian reports. The State Bar of California, meanwhile, has been asked to investigate the Huntington Beach lawyer, reports the Huffington Post. A petition to have him disbarred for advocating murder now has more than 18,000 signatures. (More California stories.)

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