For Love or Money

It's funny. A short while back, I posted a defense of a group posting the addresses of folks opposing gay marriage in Massachusetts--addresses already in the public domain, mind you--for the express purpose of initiating a dialogue between gay marriage supporters and opponents. Seems some folks thought that it was tantamount to intimidation, despite the fact that the gay marriage advocates already had begun meeting with opponents, and the opponents themselves characterized the meetings as "gracious" and not the slightest bit hostile.

My take on it was that, so long as intimidation stayed out of it, this was precisely the type of positive, grass-roots conversation that we should be encouraging in American democracy. People shouldn't be allowed to completely isolate themselves from folks negatively impacted by their votes. Yet, for the most part, that's the reality we live in. Most white voters know few, if any, African-Americans who will be effected by their votes on Affirmative Action or Reparations. Most rich voters know few, if any, poor voters who are dependent on the Welfare and Job Training programs they try to cut. And most heterosexual voters have little personal contact with gay and lesbian Americans whose rights they wish to expunge from our constitution. Ultimately, this segregated political state undermines Democratic ideals--and efforts to combat it should be applauded, not smeared as intimidating or hostile.

But I digress. Whatever claim anti-gay marriage advocates might have had in terms of "high ground" in the process of putting this issue on the ballot has evaporated at the point where they bus in out-of-state petition gathers and pay them by the signature (H/T: Sullivan). Gay marriage supporter Tom Lang was approached by a signature gatherer who asked him to sign a petition to put an anti-gay marriage amendment on the 2006 ballot. As Lang describes it:

[the petition-gatherer has a] Petition about Traditional Marriage that he would like me to sign..."You know", he said, "if you believe in 'Adam and Eve.'" He then added, "this signing on either of these just means you want it on the ballot, it doesn't really mean anything today."
[...]
I was then asked if I wanted to sign "the traditional marriage petition." When I said no, He told me that he was being paid $1 a signature and that it would really help him if I could sign!

This seems quite unethical if you ask me. Many people who are apathetic toward the gay marriage issue will be loathe to not do someone a favor for something as "meaningless" as signing a petition. But this undermines the whole point of democratic deliberation. It's hard enough to convince people to vote based off of rational considerations, but it's ridiculous when, in addition to that:

[W]e now have to worry about a "puppy-dog eyed" signature gatherer claiming that the signer is "helping him out financially" and that signing "doesn't really mean anything."

Worse yet, this may be the tip of the iceberg. Another Blogger reports that some of the gatherers aren't even telling their targets that they're signing a gay marriage petition--saying that it is for selling alcohol in supermarkets (as far as I can gather, they have the petition for both and make it into a "sign here and here" deal).

It's amazing how contorted our system has become. Out-of-state lobbyists busing in out-of-state activists soliciting signatures for cash is a-okay, but a program enabling neighbors to talk about the real impact on their own lives a political issue will have is caricatured as a threat to public safety. I'm somewhat resigned to the fact that big lobbyists are an inextricable fact of the American system. But this is the first time I've seen them literally placed on a higher scale than actual person-to-person debate.

One wonders why I become more cynical by the day.