A West Sacramento resident has started an online petition that calls on the California Bar Association to disbar Matthew Gregory McLaughlin, the Huntington Beach lawyer who authored the state voter initiative that would “put to death by bullets to the head” anyone who has had sexual relations with a person of the same gender.
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Huntington Beach Attorney Matt McLaughlin Files Ballot Measure Requiring Gays To Be Shot
Carol Dahmen's Change.org petition had on Monday cracked the 100,000 signature mark toward a goal of 150,000.
Her pitch reads:
People in the LGBT community are our family members, neighbors, and co-workers. They are people like Apple CEO Tim Cook who have changed the way we live. Imagine a law that would make it legal to kill them all. The “Sodomite Suppression Act” is a real voter initiative in California that would “put to death by bullets to the head” anyone who has had sexual relations with a person of the same gender. The initiative wasn't submitted by a fringe group, but by a California lawyer named Matthew G. McLaughlin.
Calling for the legalized murder of the LGBT community makes Mr. McLaughlin unfit to practice law. We are demanding the California Bar Association to immediately disbar Matthew G. McLaughlin to prevent him from practicing law in California.
A lawyer “who actively pursues creating laws that permit genocide has no business practicing law in California or any other state,” explains Dahmen, who believes the state bar “must act swiftly to send a clear message that Matthew G. McLaughlin's actions do not meet the standards of ethics and behavior set by their organization.”
On a smaller but more personal scale when it comes to signatures are the more than 360 McLaughlin's fellow Costa Mesa High School alums have put to a letter expressing their outrage over his Sodomite Suppression Act. (He also attended UC Irvine.)
Going after McLaughlin through the state bar has also been pushed by the California Legislature's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus, which on March 10 filed a complaint seeking an investigation of the maverick lawyer. The LGBT Caucus alleges he has run afoul of the bar's requirement that members demonstrate “good moral character.”
“We are shocked and outraged that a member of the State Bar would so callously call for the disenfranchisement, expulsion and murder of members of the LGBT community,” the caucus wrote. “We believe that this measure not only fails constitutional muster, but that such inciting and hateful language has no place in our discourse, let alone state constitution.”
More heat against McLaughlin came on Wednesday, when California Attorney General Kamala Harris revealed she will seek authority from the state Supreme Court to quash his measure, which she called “patently unconstitutional” and “utterly reprehensible.”
You can also read the initiative HERE to see if you agree it's patently unconstitutional and utterly reprehensible.
Of course, it's unlikely McLaughlin would come up with the 365,880 or so signatures he'd need to put his screed on the 2016 ballot, and the state Supreme Court would probably spike it if it did make the ballot or somehow on earth get passed by voters.
If any of the current moves will require McLaughlin being served papers, good luck with that. He hasn't actually been putting his face out there in the media, and this Talking Points Memo item explains how difficult it has been for the media to pin him down.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.