HRC exposes anti-gay group’s flouting of election disclosure laws

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As scrutiny over campaign finance laws intensifies, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has issued a memorandum detailing the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) unprecedented attempts to circumvent election disclosure laws, and how federal courts and state election boards continue to reject NOM’s claims – on at least six different occasions, the most recent earlier this month.

The memo, addressed to “interested parties” begins, “The nation’s leading anti-gay group, the National Organization for Marriage, opposes marriage and civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. Earlier this month, many of the leading Republican presidential candidates signed NOM’s pledge calling for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

“NOM has filed a raft of lawsuits to shield its donors from public disclosure. But, as this memo outlines, courts and state election boards have consistently disagreed and rejected NOM’s challenges. Donor disclosure is uniformly required across the country for federal, state and local campaigns and is widely accepted as a vital means to ensure that elections are conducted transparently and fairly.”

Joe Solmonese, HRC president said, “For some reason, NOM thinks it doesn’t have to comply with the donor disclosure laws. NOM’s aggressive legal strategy to keep its donors secret begs the question, what are they hiding? Is it that they realize it’s no longer popular to be openly anti-gay?”

The latest in NOM’s string of legal defeats came on Aug. 11 when the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals rejected NOM’s challenges in Maine and Rhode Island.

NOM argues that LGBT advocates and their supporters will harass, intimidate, even damage property of the donors, should their identities be known. But courts have soundly rejected NOM’s harassment allegations. For example, a federal judge in California pointed out that “numerous of the acts about which [they] complain are mechanisms relied upon, both historically and lawfully, to voice dissent. This court cannot condemn those who have legally exercised their own constitutional rights in order to display their dissatisfaction with [NOM’s] cause.”