The passage of Proposition 8 in California a year ago unleashed a troubling new strategy in the movement to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples: public shaming.  In an effort to slow down the ever-increasing use of propositions and referenda that forestall or overturn court or legislatively created marriage rights for same-sex couples, some advocates have been pushing hard to publicly disclose the names of people who sign petitions that get these measures on the ballot or who make donations to the organizations that support them.

The thinking goes like this: there ought to be some cost to supporting these homophobic (or at least same-sex marriage -ophobic) propositions/referenda through your signature or financial contributions.   Shame on you.  And we’ll bring shame on you by publicizing your name on the internet and elsewhere.  (See, for instance knowthyneighbors.org.)  You may then risk boycotts or picketing and angry gay people showing up on your front lawn throwing rotten lavender fruits at your home.  As the Wall Street Journal reported last winter about the fall-out after the donors to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign were revealed:

A Palo Alto dentist lost patients as a result of his $1,000 donation. A restaurant manager in Los Angeles gave a $100 personal donation, triggering a demonstration and boycott against her restaurant. The pressure was so intense that Marjorie Christoffersen, who had managed the place for 26 years, resigned.

After all, what’s wrong with making the people who support these retrograde propositions face some kind of public accountability for the role they play in the denials of lesbian and gay people’s civil rights?

Well, first off all, isn’t there something rather, um I don’t know, ironic about gay people seeking to use shame as a political tool to combat their enemies by dragging them out of the closet?  I know, we heard this argument in the 1980s and 1990s when “Outing” was in fashion, and the likes of Michael Signorile sought to “out”  gay public figures who took positions hostile to the lgbt communities’ interests.

But maybe there’s something a bit different than the same form of “outing” going on now.  The current political and legal strategy to force disclosure of supporters/contributors to anti- marriage equality measures smells a lot like the strategies that were used by racists, anti-communists, anti-unionists, and others in the 1950s and 1960s when they demanded that organizations such as the NAACP, the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, unions, SDS chapters, the Social Workers Party among others divulge their membership lists.  There was a spate of Supreme Court cases in this period that found pretty consistently that these disclosure laws violated the First Amendment associational rights of the members of these organizations.  This was particularly the case when, as the Court held,

There was substantial uncontroverted evidence that public identification of persons in the community as members of the organizations had been followed by harassment and threats of bodily harm. There was also evidence that fear of community hostility and economic reprisals that would follow public disclosure of the membership lists had discouraged new members from joining the organizations and induced former members to withdraw. This repressive effect, while in part the result of private attitudes and presures, was brought to bear only after the exercise of governmental power had threatened to force disclosure of the members’ names.

This language came from Bates v. City of Little Rock, the 1960 case that challenged the Arkansas law forcing the NAACP to disclose the identity of their membership.  But it could just as well describe the current aims and effects of efforts to gain disclosure of anti-gay marriage supporters.

Perhaps more important, it was quite common for public and private actors to seek disclosure of the membership lists of various lesbian and gay rights organizations not so long ago.  After all, until recently, the membership of the organizations was made up of felons – admitted sodomites.  Perhaps we’ve forgotten what a risk we all felt we were taking when we joined the Daughters of Bilitis or the Mattachine Society, or what courage it took to subscribe to their magazines – The Ladder and the Mattachine Review.

Today, in New York, San Francisco we take it as common-place, if not irritating, when we are stopped on the street by the young person with an HRC clip-board paid by the hour to get new members, and thus membership in lgbt organizations seems like such a trivial matter.  But joining these organizations is not a trivial matter everywhere in the U.S. and not that long ago it wasn’t in the homo-metropoles either.  (Notably, the lesbian and gay lawyers organization in San Francisco still has a closet name: BALIF- Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom, and not too long ago New York’s lgbt lawyers group was called BAHR-GNY – the Bar Association for Human Rights of Greater New York.)

A rather shocked colleague commented to me after I gave a paper the other day:  “Katherine, you really are a radical,” and it’s true, but I don’t countenance strategies committed to “by any means necessary.”   Just as I didn’t support liberal groups’ plans in 1990 to queer-bait David Souter on account of his being unmarried when he was nominated to the Supreme Court, I find myself recoiling at today’s turn to shaming as political tactic.

There are important issues at stake in the disclosure of the names of those who support these propositions we abhor.   Associational rights have been highlighted in the Supreme Court’s discussion of this strategy in other settings, but there are important concerns of chilling political participation, privacy, and the anti-deliberative impulses of mob-based retribution as well.  Then there’s the goose and gander issue – just because the climate in some places right now might make disclosure of these names “useful” to the marriage equality movement, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t establishing a precedent for a strategy that will likely come to bite us in the butt in the future – or bite the butts right now of allied movements whose vulnerabilities we ought to be keeping in mind (try giving a donation to a benevolent organization in Iran or Palestine these days, as I have: you know your donation cannot be made anonymously).

Sure, I delight in these moments riddled with schadenfreude as much as the next person, but as my mother used to say, that doesn’t make it right.

We learned late last week that David Souter plans to step down from the Supreme Court at the end of this term. Nominated by President George H. W. Bush in July of 1990 on the expectation that he would be a dependable conservative vote on the Court, Justice Souter has instead marked his time on the Supreme Court as a reliable member of the Court’s left. Not only has his judicial ideology departed from that which was expected of him, but the Court’s center has shifted markedly to the right, making his rather moderate views seem “left-ish” in comparison. Rumors of Justice Souter’s resignation set off the usual parlor games among bloggers and law professors alike. Rather than weigh in on who I think is likely to replace Justice Souter, a little back story on his nomination in 1990 may put the current nominatory climate into some perspective. In the intervening almost 20 years since David Souter was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Bush the First, much has changed. Let’s hope that the issue of the nominee’s personal life is one of them.

In July of 1990, President Bush nominated David Souter to fill William Brennan’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. At the time, I was the Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild – the national association of progressive lawyers and legal workers. It fell to us and the rest of the “critical left” to formulate an opinion about the Souter nomination and, most likely, to oppose it – he was, after all, being nominated by a republican President.

The NLG played a key role in the meetings that were immediately convened in Washington to discuss strategy. Of the national organizations that attended these gatherings – the ACLU, the Alliance for Justice, People for the American Way, the Center for Constitutional Rights, NOW, etc. – the Guild was the only membership organization that had lawyers in New Hampshire who knew Souter and his reputation. Everyone else was, “who?” We worked up a briefing paper for the first meeting, and the only “dirt” we could find on him was his aggressive prosecution when he was the New Hampshire Attorney General of a couple of hippies who had covered up with tape the “Live Free Or Die” slogan on the license plates on their van because they disagreed with the state’s motto. Otherwise, our New Hampshire members told us that he was a very quiet, ascetic man who had never married and preferred books to people.

When we began to discuss possible strategies for derailing the nomination – of course we had to since Bush had nominated him – the Executive Director of one of the aforementioned organizations declared: “Maybe he’s gay, we can use that on him.” The confirmation fight of Robert Bork was still fresh in our minds – having occurred only 3 years earlier – so why not “Bork him” with homosexuality?

Pat Maher, who was then the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, looked over at me and we exchanged the “are you going to take this one, or should I?”-look. I stood up and made clear that “queer-baiting” the nominee was not an acceptable strategy. There was some “why not?” kind of push back we got from several people at the meeting – “maybe we could just float the suggestion informally, and let it circulate for others to pick up and run with?” suggested one person. “We have so little to work with.” After all, “outing” as a political tactic used by gay people against closeted gay people had just started to get public attention. Six months earlier, gay activists had “outed” Mark Hatfield, a Republican United States Senator from Oregon, because he supported legislation initiated by Jesse Helms. In March of 1990, recently deceased Malcolm Forbes was outed by Michelangelo Signorile. Why not David Souter too?

Pat and I took turns answering the homophobic suggestions that we exploit the suggestion of Souter’s presumed gay-ness, turning back the creative ways we could “out him” as a way to undermine his viability as a member of the Supreme Court. We had no actual evidence that Souter was gay, rather he was an unmarried adult man who at the time still lived with his mother. He had not taken public positions that were anti-gay or was otherwise duplicitous in his public and private life – as was Hatfield and today’s Larry Craig. Merely outing him, or suggesting that he might be gay, was capitalizing on the homophobia otherwise circulating in society and Washington. Not acceptable.

Pat and I won the day – we didn’t go with the “outing” strategy – instead we opted for the “stealth nominee” idea (we coined the term).

Obama’s short list, or at least the one circulating in the parlors of law schools and Washington, contains several candidates with private lives like Souter’s: neither Elena Kagen nor Janet Napolitano have been married. But get this: Kathleen Sullivan, former dean of the Stanford Law School and Pam Karlan a law professor also at Stanford, both often mentioned for the Court, are actually out lesbians. You can be sure that the republican members of Congress and the advocacy groups lining up to oppose any Obama appointee are strategizing how to raise the “gay” issue with Kagen, Napolitano and Sullivan (the conservative blogosphere is already well down that road). 2009 isn’t 1990 – and the mere suggestion of homosexuality doesn’t have the same unseemly undermining effect that it did back then. But it ain’t nothing – like not paying your taxes seems to be now. (Remember Zoe Baird?).

So when queer-baiting these nominees is inevitably suggested let’s hope there’s someone in the room who stands up and urges a different tactic. Just as some Republicans have come to appreciate how their opposition to same sex marriage may be hurting the party, or so says the New York Times, queer-baiting Supreme Court nominees may be counterproductive for them as well – more so today than it was 20 years ago when David Souter’s name, and life, came before the Senate Judiciary Committee.