ADF Spins It Their Way

Somebody alerted me to a web site with some information on it about our local controversy. Our Montgomery County anti-gay/anti-transgender group, currently calling themselves Citizens for a Responsible Government, submitted petitions to have a referendum put on the ballot in November. They submitted enough names, and the Board of Elections looked them over and certified them. Equality Maryland got copies of the petitions and the voter registration database, and has been going through them, looking at the signatures, and has determined that thousands of them were improperly validated by the elections board. On the basis of that, a group of county citizens filed suit against the board.

In the meantime, the Citizens for a Responsible Whatever (it used to be "Curriculum," they changed it to "Government") retained a legal group that has been involved in all kinds of rightwing causes. I'm reading about the Alliance Defense Fund in Wikipedia:

The Alliance Defense Fund ("ADF") is a conservative Christian non-profit organization with the stated goal of "defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation." In practice ADF is opposed to all forms of abortion, same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, allowing LGBT persons to serve in the military, and sex education in schools that includes comprehensive education on contraception. ADF also works to establish public prayer in schools and government events, and to protect religious displays in government settings, like crosses and other religious monuments built on public lands.

ADF was launched in 1994 by Bill Bright (founder, Campus Crusade for Christ), Larry Burkett (founder, Crown Financial Ministries), James Dobson (founder, Focus on the Family), D. James Kennedy (founder, Coral Ridge Ministries), Marlin Maddoux (President, International Christian Media), and Donald Wildmon (founder, American Family Association), along with the leadership of over thirty other conservative Christian organizations. ADF supports allied attorneys and organizations through strategy, training, funding, and direct litigation through its legal team. Wikipedia: Allied Defense Fund

So this is a big-time group with connections to all the Family Blah-Blah organizations.

They put up something on their web site about their support for the CRW's referendum effort. You might find some of this interesting.

BALTIMORE — Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund filed a motion Wednesday asking a Maryland court to allow voters to defend a petition being challenged by advocates of homosexual behavior even though the signatures have already been certified. A citizen voter coalition collected substantially more than the required number of signatures for the referendum petition, which gives voters their right to be heard on a county bill that extends special legal protections based on "gender identity."

"In America, every citizen’s voice counts. The signatures on these petitions are valid, so these citizens should not be denied the right to have their vote count in an important referendum," said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Austin R. Nimocks. "In Maryland, the people are the ultimate legislative authority and they must be heard." ADF to defend Md. voters’ right to be heard

They would like to portray this as a way for "the people" to be heard.

You got to hand it to these characters, they have a way of simplifying things so even the stupidest person can get their point. Actually, this kind of argument is tailored for stupid people.

The public doesn't vote on every little thing. The reason is this: being informed about the details of policy, the potential effects of particular decisions, the political subtleties of policy choices, is a full-time job. You and I don't have enough hours in the day to ponder every word of every bill the County Council votes on, never mind the state legislature and Congress. We can't consider every line in the budget, government employees' salaries, hiring people to maintain the roads and the parks and trash collection.

We elect people to do that. It's their job, they spend eight hours a day doing nothing else, and most of them end up going out at night and meeting with the public or with interested parties, too. And they have people working for them who find out information and help them understand it all. It's a lot of people putting in a lot of hours.

The County Council members were elected, as I recall, by large majorities, and they voted unanimously to add some wording to the standing nondiscrimination law. The County Executive signed the new bill without hesitation.

The people are in control of the process. We elect the people who put in the hours necessary for this sort of thing. We are a republic, not a democracy. If "the people" voted on every piece of policy and law, you would have chaos as uninformed people made important decisions, and you would have unbelievable inequities as the majority gave all special privileges to themselves. Our country is intentionally not like that.

If the citizens of the county were asked how they feel about gender identity, surveys show that ninety percent of them would say "Huh?" People don't know what the term "gender identity" means, most of them don't know a transgender person, most people don't care one way or the other about it. People in our county lean toward fairness, they would figure, okay, somebody changes from a man to a woman or vice versa, it's their life, they deserve to be treated fairly, and that would be it.

The other side however has described the issue in sensationalistic terms. Their web site isn't called "discriminateagainsttransgender.com," it's called "notmyshower.net." Because it's about showers. It's about men going into the ladies locker rooms. And if you asked people to vote on that, just about everybody would vote against it, nobody wants men in the ladies room, especially pedophiles and predators that they keep talking about.

That means if this goes to referendum there will have to be a huge educational effort. You can say "predators in the ladies room" or "safety of children" in one short breath, but you can't explain why somebody would want to change their sex without going into some detail, some nuance. It will be expensive, it will require a lot of effort to get the public up to the level of knowledge that the Council had when they voted on this thing.

ADF has more to say:

The group Equality Maryland filed suit to challenge the petition process and various signatures shortly after the Montgomery County Board of Elections certified them. ADF attorneys filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit, Doe v. Montgomery County Board of Elections, on behalf of Citizens for Responsible Government to protect the interests of the voters of Montgomery County.

"No evidence has been presented to show that any of the signatures are invalid or that these registered voters should not take part in the democratic process," said Nimocks. "The political agenda of an activist group cannot be allowed to disenfranchise the voters of an entire county. The referendum simply allows the people of Montgomery County to decide the issue, but apparently Equality Maryland doesn’t want the people to be heard."

There is a good reason that no evidence has been presented, and that is that there hasn't been a court hearing yet. You don't present the evidence when you file a suit, you do that later, which I would think these lawyers would know.

It's probably pretty smart for them to pretend to be the mainstream, contrasted to an "activist group" like Equality Maryland. Except people have just come through nearly eight years of the Bush administration and don't have much tolerance any more for the religious right and its judgmental, self-interested ways. Nobody thinks of that as "mainstream," especially around here.