Tim Eyman and Washington Won’t Discriminate
[I posted this on Saturday morning, but I’m moving it up to today’s Slog.]
I didn’t use to hate Tim Eyman as much as other WA state liberals, but Eyman jumped my personal shark when he started campaigning against the state’s gay rights bill.
It wasn’t so much that supposedly libertarian Eyman was leading an effort repeal the rights; heck, there’s a principled libertarian argument against minority rights protections. But Eyman wasn’t making a libertarian argument. Eyman’s Referendum 65 would overturn the state’s gay rights bill, which protects gays and lesbians from discrimination in employment, housing, and credit. But most people are either for those piddling protections and/or assume they’re already in place. So Eyman, that lying sack of shit (LSOS for short), is campaigning for R-65 with this tag line: “No quotas, no preferential treatment, no gay marriage!”
Uh, the state’s gay rights bill doesn’t require quotas or preferential treatment, and it has nothing to do with gay marriage. And LSOS, a smart guy, knows that.
Jumping ahead: earlier this week LSOS announced to his supporters that Referendum 65 might not make it onto the ballot this November. From the PI:
Tim Eyman sent the e-mail to supporters and the media, saying that only 8,718 signatures have been gathered. He needs 112,440 valid voter signatures by June 7 to get Referendum 65 on the November ballot.“It’s gut-check time,” Eyman said by phone Wednesday. “Do we really want this thing on the ballot? Yes or no.”
Some analysis of the numbers from Goldy:
To qualify for the ballot Eyman must collect 112,440 signatures by June 7, but not all these will be valid. The Secretary of State recommends a cushion of 25 percent, but let’s be generous and say Tim can get by with only 10 percent, for a minimum target of 124,000 signatures.As of yesterday, Eyman claimed to have collected only 8,718 signatures, while hateful, nutcase preacher Joe Fuiten claimed to have another 2,900. That left them about 112,000 shy of their target with only 42 days before the deadline…
To qualify for the ballot, the R-65 campaign would have to collect about 2,700 signatures a day, 7 days a week, from now until June 7… not necessarily an impossible task if you can afford to hire an army of paid signature gatherers.
But Eyman doesn’t have the funds to hire an army, and so it looks like R-65 won’t be on the ballot.
Of course LSOS, being an LSOS, could by lying. He could have all the signatures he needs, and is only claiming to be way behind in order to shake some money out of his terrified, gay-hating supporters ("Oh, my god! Gays and lesbians with jobs, credit cards, and apartments! Run for your lives!”). He could also be attempting to discourage pro-gay volunteers and donors from getting involved in the effort to defeat Eyman's initiative.
Yeah, could be. But unlikely. More from Goldy:
I suppose it is possible this latest email could be a clever feint, but I fail to see the tactical advantage of portraying his campaign as weaker than it really is, and besides... Timmy isn't really all that clever. So in the absence of even the tiniest scrap of evidence that the R-65 signature drive is gaining any traction whatsoever (you know, like actual people gathering actual signatures)... I'm going to have to reluctantly take Eyman at his word.(Yuck.)
So... absent a sudden, six-figure infusion of cash, R-65 doesn't have a snowball's chance of making it onto the ballot.
I'm with Goldy: campaigns typically don't announce that they're doing poorly. It's a bad strategy, particularly if you paint your current circumstances as so dire that only a six-figure miracle can save you. So it seems clear that the answer to LSOS' questiondo the voters in Washington State want this thing on the ballot?is no, we don't, LSOS.
There's a silver lining to the collapse of LSOS' Referendum 65: it looks like the gay community is going to avoid having to donate money or volunteer hours to Washington Won't Discriminate, the group that was created to fight Eyman's initiative. WWD is in disarray; some good people were quickly hired to manage the campaign, and those same good people quickly left under murky circumstances. And, of course, those good people won't say for the record why they left.
What's worse, the same slight lights that ran the gay rights movement off a cliff a decade ago are congealing around WWD. (Hi, Laurie Jinkins!) The gay idiocracy (Hi, Anne Levinson!) that wouldn't listen to Cal Anderson, Ed Murray, Tina Podlodowski, or to, uh, me during the run-up to their disastrous, ill-advised, "pro-gay" rights initiative campaign, and then proved themselves incapable of running an effective state-wide campaign once they got I-677 on the ballot, weren't inspiring confidence among gay funders or observersmost of whom won't comment for the record. (After a decade and a half in Seattle, I think gay politics in Washington state can by summed up with three words: cowards enabling idiots.)
So if R-65 is going down, we've dodged a bulletno need to fund WWD or volunteer for WWD or write about WWD. Whew!
Unfortunately there's another bullet in the chamber: the gay marriage decision that we've been expecting any day now for what feels like a decade now. If the Washington State Supreme Court declares gay marriage constitutional and overturns the sate's DOMAsome think the delay points to a pro-gay rights decision, some think it points to conthere will be a backlash. And while amending our state constitution is difficult, it's not impossible, and we could be faced with having to launch a massive state-wide campaign to convince voters to say yes to gay marriage, a much harder sell than convincing them to say yes to gay credit cards.
And like flies to shit, the same fuckwits who couldn't get WWD off the groundor raise money, or hold on to political talentwill swarm around the new group, and we will be faced with the same dilemma: Are we going to donate time and money to a group run by the dopes who should have been run out of the state after I-677's defeat? Or are gays and lesbians in Washington state with some political sense going to speak up? Will they refuse to fund a group run by the discredited gay idiocracy? And will they say sopublicly, on the recordand risk angering the gay idiocracy in order to protect the gay community?
"Libertarian" == whiney tax dodger with no moiral backbone or sense of community. I have no idea why people give tome to these people.