The Daily Kos does not appear to be a champion of free speech.
Last week Daily Kos removed a post criticizing the site for its anti-Mormon bigotry.
Now it is rallying its followers to target Mormons who have donated to the Proposition 8 campaign. Once identified, the plan is to dig into their backgrounds, with the hopes of harassing and discrediting their efforts.
As a matter of fact, the No on Prop 8 folks told me recently that the “Protect Marriage” campaign has raised $30 million dollars–over half of it from the Mormon Church. Now, I have nothing personally against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They most certainly have the constitutional right to worship in their own way. They have the right to minister in whatever way they see fit and to marry whomever they see fit in their churches based on any qualifications they choose. And they will be well within their rights.
But when the church and its members invest millions of dollars in an attempt to write discrimination into my state’s constitution and divorce my friend Brian against his will, there will be hell to pay.
So what am I asking you to do?
Some distributed research.
There is a list of a bunch of Mormon donors to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign (in case that one goes down, here’s a mirror with slightly worse formatting.
Here’s what I’m asking for:
This list contains information about those who are big donors to the Yes on 8 campaign–donors to the tune of at least $1,000 dollars. And, as you can see, there are a lot of them. It also indicates if they’re Mormon or not.
If you’re interested in defeating the religious right and preserving marriage equality, here’s how you can help:
Find us some ammo.
Use any LEGAL tool at your disposal. Use OpenSecrets to see if these donors have contributed to…shall we say…less than honorable causes, or if any one of these big donors has done something otherwise egregious. If so, we have a legitimate case to make the Yes on 8 campaign return their contributions, or face a bunch of negative publicity . . .
Feel free to use Lexis-Nexis searches as well for anything useful, especially given that these people are using “morality” as their primary motivation to support Prop 8…if you find anything that belies that in any way…well, you know what to do . . .
Here’s the bottom line for me: if someone is willing to contribute thousands of dollars to a campaign to take away legal rights from some very dear friends of mine, they had damn well make sure their lives are beyond scrutiny–because I, for one, won’t take it lying down.
Unfortunately, the media has played along with this emphasis by making Mormon donations to support Proposition 8 a major issue (never mind the millions big celebrities and others have given to opppose it).
I thought it was odd that the Associated Press included a link in this story to a site called Mormons for Proposition 8, which at first blush would appear to be a pro-Mormon site in the church’s efforts to preserve traditional marriage. However, it’s a ruse to “out” all Mormon donors and its purported benign motives have been betrayed by the Daily Kos.
Forget debating on the merits. When your personal politics is on the line, “by any means necessary” is an acceptable tactic. Personally attacking people and making their lives miserable is acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of your idea of “fairness.”
P.S. Besides this coordinated harassment campaign, here’s an isolated but a very disturbing incident of violence against a Prop 8 supporter.
P.P.S. How are donors being identified as Mormon?
[via The Corner]
