Ready, Set, Harrass!
Boston, MA-Eric Francke, 12-22-05
After certification yesterday of the signatures for the marriage amendment banning gay marriage, the opposition,
www.knowthyneighbor.org has announced that they have published the names and addresses of those who signed the petition.
The director of the site, Thomas Lang, has made little effort to hide the fact that his intent is to have activists personally confront and challenge everyone who signs the petition, targeting citizens’ homes and businesses.
''Everyone's scrambling to know who in their town would sign this,'' Lang told the Boston Herald. ''And this Web site will give gay people the tools to know, to defend themselves and their families, to let them go neighbor-to- neighbor and say, 'I don't appreciate your signing this.'" Lang said: "I'm going to be aggressive personally. I want to know that the people I do business with are not against [gay marriage]. This is going to be won by economics.''
In the announcement of the release of the names, Lang encourages activists to "engage in meaningful conversations with people who may not fully understand the implications of the proposed amendment on the lives of same-sex couples and their families....A face-to-face conversation with someone you know can be a powerful way to break through the superficial barriers that separate us."
The
www.knowthyneighbor.org site provides those who sign an opportunity to click on a link to remove their name from the list of signers of the petition. Presumably the intention is that if enough activists call, picket, intimidate or otherwise harass the petition signers, they will go to the site and request that their name be removed from the list, thus giving the activists ammunition to challenge the petition. The site already claims some 250 volunteers ready to achieve their goals.
This effort to stop the gathering of signatures is similar to what happened to the Protection of Marriage amendment in 2001, when they also posted individual's names on the internet. The names and addresses of his "volunteers" are not disclosed by Lang.
