Due to Left’s intolerance, the Right leads litigation against burdensome campaign finance disclosure

Yesterday (Oct. 11), the Star Tribune published my column explaining how disclosure of contributions made to support or oppose ballot questions can infringe upon First Amendment rights of speech, association and privacy of belief.  To explain why someone might want to keep their beliefs private, I ask readers to “consider a person with a firm belief in the sanctity of marriage between a man and women, yet enjoys strong business relationships with homosexual clients and colleagues.”  Obviously, I made the reference because the definition of marriage is the current ballot question at issue.   

But to balance out the column, I tried to think of another situation where someone on the left might want to maintain privacy for fear of serious reprisals, whether professional or personal.  Nothing much came to mind.

I did think of a couple other examples on the right.  Union members would certainly want to keep beliefs supporting right-to-work laws to themselves, which happens to be another possible ballot question for 2012.  If the elimination of race considerations in hiring decisions—i.e.,  elimination of affirmative action—were on the ballot, I imagine some protected class members favoring the measure might want to keep their beliefs private as well.

I thought a little more on it today and, again, nothing came to mind.  So I walked down the hall to Mitch Pearlstein’s office and asked if he could think of an example.   Nope.

Mitch did bring up the issue of raising taxes, but we both agreed that wasn’t comparable.  It’s true that conservatives are at least as intransigent on taxes as some liberals are on gay marriage, right-to-work and affirmative action.  Nonetheless, I can’t think of a situation where a person’s standing in their community or their job might be compromised if they expressed support for raising taxes.

Generally speaking, conservatives just don’t take things to the extreme emotional and personal level that demands lock-step agreement and punishes people who fall astray.  Yes, conservatives can have some harsh words against conservative leaders who wander on certain positions, but the average person is usually treated with civility.  Jobs and community standing are never at risk.  In short, conservatives are just more tolerant.

This perhaps didn’t used to be the case.   After all, the Supreme Court’s landmark case on keeping membership lists confidential was NAACP v. Alabama.  And it was in Brown v. Socialist Workers ’74 Campaign Committee where the Supreme Court affirmed the fact that there are situations where the government cannot force the disclosure of contributions to candidates for public office.   In each case, the parties were threatened by folks more traditionally associated with the right.

But all that is history. 

Today, we seem to live in world where certain elements of the left feel free to actively stifle beliefs and opinions, whether it’s shouting down a conservative speaker on a college campus, unethically pressuring a child-care worker to sign a union card, or labeling a black man an Uncle Tom for simply holding conservative views.   

And so, instead of the left, we now see conservative and libertarian groups leading litigation efforts defending First Amendment rights against burdensome campaign finance disclosure laws.