This was put on clear view this week when executives with the OK Cupid dating site warned users of the Mozilla Firefox browser who came to their site that they were using the product of a company run by an alleged homophobe. The Mountain View-based Mozilla Foundation responded by pushing out CEO Brendan Eich, who donated $1,000 in 2008 to the campaign for Proposition 8. That’s the California ballot measure banning same-sex marriage that was narrowly approved but has since been nullified by federal courts.

James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal has more details and some very pertinent Golden State context:

“There has been no claim that Eich, an executive of Mozilla Corp. since its founding in 2005, discriminated against gay employees. …

“Eich’s support for Proposition 8 became public knowledge because of a California law requiring disclosure of personal information — name, address, occupation and employer’s name — of anybody who gives $100 or more to a campaign for or against a ballot initiative. The secretary of state’s office is required to post this information online [and does so on] an easily searchable database.

“Which brings us back to Citizens United. It is known as a 5-4 decision, and most of it was, but one part of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion–upholding a provision requiring disclosure of political contributions–was for an 8-1 majority, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting alone.”

‘We have plans for you and your friends’

“Thomas’s argument rested heavily on the facts of the Proposition 8 campaign, and it’s worth quoting at length …:

‘Some opponents of Proposition 8 compiled this information and created Web sites with maps showing the locations of homes or businesses of Proposition 8 supporters. Many supporters (or their customers) suffered property damage, or threats of physical violence or death, as a result. They cited these incidents in a complaint they filed after the 2008 election, seeking to invalidate California’s mandatory disclosure laws. Supporters recounted being told: “Consider yourself lucky. If I had a gun I would have gunned you down along with each and every other supporter,” or, “we have plans for you and your friends.” Proposition 8 opponents also allegedly harassed the measure’s supporters by defacing or damaging their property. Two religious organizations supporting Proposition 8 reportedly received through the mail envelopes containing a white powdery substance.

‘Those accounts are consistent with media reports describing Proposition 8-related retaliation. The director of the nonprofit California Musical Theater gave $1,000 to support the initiative; he was forced to resign after artists complained to his employer. The director of the Los Angeles Film Festival was forced to resign after giving $1,500 because opponents threatened to boycott and picket the next festival. And a woman who had managed her popular, family-owned restaurant for 26 years was forced to resign after she gave $100, because “throngs of [angry] protesters” repeatedly arrived at the restaurant and “shout[ed] ‘shame on you’ at customers.” The police even had to “arriv[e] in riot gear one night to quell the angry mob” at the restaurant. Ibid. Some supporters of Proposition 8 engaged in similar tactics; one real estate businessman in San Diego who had donated to a group opposing Proposition 8 “received a letter from the Prop. 8 Executive Committee threatening to publish his company’s name if he didn’t also donate to the ‘Yes on 8’ campaign.”

‘The success of such intimidation tactics has apparently spawned a cottage industry that uses forcibly disclosed donor information to pre-empt citizens’ exercise of their First Amendment rights. Before the 2008 Presidential election, a “newly formed nonprofit group . . . plann[ed] to confront donors to conservative groups, hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.” Its leader, “who described his effort as ‘going for the jugular,’ ” detailed the group’s plan to send a “warning letter . . . alerting donors who might be considering giving to right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives.”

‘These instances of retaliation sufficiently demonstrate why this Court should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements.’

Orwell thought it would be government — not interest groups

My references to thoughtcrime and group-hate (or two-minute hate) come, of course, from “1984.” But unlike in the Orwell novel, the government isn’t behind these campaigns. Instead, it’s privatized.

Here’s hoping that California doesn’t again start a trend copied around the world. I voted against Prop. 8 in 2008, and Prop. 22 in 2000, for that matter. I am not a social conservative and find the Jon Fleischmann argument that social conservatives are less likely to be RINOs on economic conservatism hard to buy. During the latter days of House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the early years of Bush 43, social conservative GOP House members acted like LBJ circa 1965. Yeah, surrrrre, they were pure. If libertarians and libertarian lites could wield power without having to occasionally go along with social conservative policies, I think that would be a day to celebrate.

But I don’t want to live in a society where behavioral vigilantes hurt people and think they hold the moral high ground as they take wrecking balls to the lives of those with different views.

Good for Andrew Sullivan, the most high-profile pundit who happens to be gay in the English-language media, for making this argument as well.

“[Eich] did not understand that in order to be a CEO of a company, you have to renounce your heresy! There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! Yep, that’s left-liberal tolerance in a nut-shell. No, he wasn’t a victim of government censorship or intimidation. He was a victim of the free market in which people can choose to express their opinions by boycotts, free speech and the like. He still has his full First Amendment rights. But what we’re talking about is the obvious and ugly intolerance of parts of the gay movement, who have reacted to years of being subjected to social obloquy by returning the favor. …

“It is also unbelievably stupid for the gay rights movement. You want to squander the real gains we have made by argument and engagement by becoming just as intolerant of others’ views as the Christianists? You’ve just found a great way to do this. It’s a bad, self-inflicted blow. And all of us will come to regret it.”

But while many millions of voters are increasingly comfortable with the equating of anti-black discrimination and anti-gay discrimination, they don’t necessarily slip into the same stance when it comes to immigration — specifically the idea that racial animus drives those who question amnesty or amnesty-lite policies that trivialize federal laws.

Consider the fallout from a court ruling last week of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This is from the L.A. Times’ account:

“SAN FRANCISCO — An attorney is vowing to appeal a federal court ruling that a Northern California high school that asked students to remove American flag shirts on Cinco de Mayo acted reasonably to avoid igniting ethnic tensions.

“The ruling stemmed from a 2010 incident that provoked angry commentary across the country and a lawsuit by students claiming their constitutional rights had been violated.

“An attorney for three students who sued said he would ask a larger panel of the 9th Circuit to overturn the ruling.

“‘I am pretty astonished that in this country you can’t express your patriotic freedom without offending people of other national origins,’ said William Becker Jr., who represented the students on behalf of FreedomX, a nonprofit he heads to advocate free-speech cases for conservatives and Christians.

“If the school feared a disturbance, it should have canceled the Cinco de Mayo celebration, ‘not deprived students of their 1st Amendment rights to patriotic expression,’ he said.

“In siding with the Morgan Hill Unified School District, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said administrators at Live Oak School had reason to fear the flag attire might spark a potentially violent race-related disturbance during the school-sanctioned celebration of the Mexican holiday.”

Recipe for blowback

Since this ruling came down, I have seen lots of reaction that says the decision makes sense, given school administrators’ responsibility to keep students safe.

But I have not seen a single white Californian — in print, in emails, on Twitter, anywhere — who thinks the white students did something wrong or who is comfortable with how this mess played out then and now. One Dem I know said he would have filibustered school board meetings for the rest of his life before allowing his daughter to go to a school in a district that sent kids home for wearing U.S. flags in a proud way.

My point here is going to be muddled no matter what because of my ambivalence on this issue. If I lived in Mexico and wanted my family to have a better life, I wouldn’t think twice about breaking U.S. law to come here. I also think that America needs a big influx of people to pay for the Baby Boomers going on the dole.

But I also think there is massive intellectual dishonesty on the part of many of those who support illegal immigration or who report on the issue. If you add millions of unskilled laborers to the U.S. work force, of-bleeping-course the unskilled laborers who are already in the U.S. work force will suffer. That group includes mostly minorities. How come this is never mentioned?

Oh, well. Expecting rationalism or honesty in politics or political journalism is stupid, so I’ll just shut up now.

I’m still giddy after the California Supreme Court ruled last month that the state had every right to shut down those noxious enemies of property rights and fiscal responsibility — redevelopment agencies. Better yet, the state’s high court ruled that another law that allowed those agencies to come back into existence was unconstitutional.

As of February, anyway, redevelopment is dead in California, the victim of an absurdly arrogant legal and political strategy pursued by redevelopment’s chief defenders. This is wonderful news, made even better by the teeth-gnashing of public officials who have routinely abused their powers under redevelopment law. Cry me a river.

But before I gloat too much, we need to remember that this victory already resembles one of those cheap horror movies where the Evil Thing has been vanquished, and all appears well, then its hand pokes out from the grave just as the credits begin.

No one gives up riches and power without a fight, so redevelopment lobbyists already are crafting new legislation to replace the dead agencies with new, revised versions. (Meanwhile, successor agencies will pay off old debt, and old projects will go on to completion. Many of those projects and property transfers slapped together after the law killing redevelopment agencies, or RDAs, was passed will be audited by the state controller, stopped or tied up in litigation. Many RDA officials, thankfully, will be out of work.) The fight goes on but I never would have expected such progress.

One of my earliest memories as a newly hired editorialist at the Register in the late 1990s was meeting with local property-rights activists in a parking lot outside a subsidized shopping mall project and looking at their charts explaining why a process called “redevelopment” was such a problem. As we gawked at the fruits of redevelopment’s corporate welfare, they explained how these urban-renewal agencies float debt without accountability and routinely misuse eminent domain, government’s power to seize private property for supposedly public purposes.

Days of Despair

As I plunged deeply into the issue, I never forgot that sense of near-hopelessness I felt in that parking lot. I never forgot the despair I saw on the faces of homeowners in Garden Grove as they begged the city to scotch a quietly hatched plan that would have driven them out of their middle-class neighborhood so that the city could market the land to a theme-park developer that was yet to be determined.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed victims of eminent domain, many of them immigrant small-business owners who couldn’t believe what was happening to them in America. They were bullied, put out of business and forced to spend years battling City Hall rather than building a better life.

The general public learned of the injustices after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo vs. City of New London, in Connecticut, which upheld the “right” of governments to use eminent domain for redevelopment-type economic projects. The grand revitalization project that destroyed homeowner Susette Kelo’s Connecticut neighborhood was abandoned, and the site remains a dumping ground. It serves as a reminder that officials in the United States can’t plan an economy any better than their equivalents in the old Soviet empire. Free markets work better than bureaucratic central planning.

I’ve seen how the redevelopment process has distorted economic markets and made it more difficult for people without political connections to build their businesses and their dreams. Redevelopment embodies crony capitalism, but there’s so much money in it, with so many consultants and politicians who benefit from it, that I never dreamed of the day when it could actually go away. Who would have thought that redevelopment agencies would be the ones on the outside looking in, scheming for new ways to regain some power and privilege?

Redevelopment officials are so used to getting their way with average citizens that they figured it would be no problem giving state elected officials the back of their hand. The seeds of their demise were sown after former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger attempted to divert some of their funds to fill part the perpetual state budget hole.

Diversion Scheme

Redevelopment — which morphed decades ago from a mechanism to fight urban blight into a scheme to divert county and state taxes to cities — is a creation of the state, so the governor argued that the state had the right to take some money. The League of California Cities and the California Redevelopment Association struck back with Proposition 22, approved by voters in November 2010, which forbade state diversions of redevelopment funds. It was sold to the public as a means to stop Sacramento politicians’ raids on local road funds.

The blight barons were gloating after their big victory, but then Gov. Jerry Brown came up with a work-around. He signed a law that shut down RDAs. After all, Prop. 22 can’t stop a raid on funds of agencies that no longer exist. And then he also signed a law that allowed the agencies to come back to power after paying funds to the state.

The redevelopment community challenged both laws and was pleased when the high court agreed to review them. But redevelopment advocates were stunned by the unanimous ruling that found that the Legislature was perfectly within its authority to abolish agencies that it had created. The justices also ruled 6-1 that agencies cannot buy their way back into existence because that violates Prop. 22, the very initiative the RDAs had crafted. How sweet is that reasoning?

I celebrated one recent night at philanthropist Moe Mohanna’s downtown Sacramento Oddfellows building. Many in this odd group of activists on the left and right, including Mohanna, had been abused by redevelopment agencies. We ate Persian food and savored the rare victory for the good guys. But we realized that redevelopment is, as the Monty Python troupe once said, “not quite dead.”

Let’s hope coalitions emerge this year to keep this Evil Thing in its grave.

— Steven Greenhut