A U.S. District Court in Tacoma, Washington, will conduct a trial in Doe v Reed starting on September 27, 2011. This the case filed in July 2009 over whether people who signed one particular referendum petition are entitled to keep their names and addresses from being made public. The U.S. District Court had ruled that the First Amendment protects privacy for petition signers, but the 9th circuit had reversed. Then, on June 24, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued an opinion saying that there is no such privacy right in general, but that if the proponents can show that there is a reasonable chance that they would be harassed, then they are entitled to privacy.
Thus, the trial will be to determine whether the signers of this one particular referendum petition qualify for privacy. The subject of this particular referendum was whether or not to rescind a bill passed by the Washington state legislature for civil unions for same-sex couples. The referendum was held in 2009 and the voters upheld the civil unions law.
In a sense, the people who filed the lawsuit have already partially won, because while the case is pending, their names and addresses continue to be withheld. As time passes, fewer and fewer people will even remember or care who signed the petition.
People forget about government tyranny. That is the reason why names should be shielded. You quote “As time passes, fewer and fewer people will even remember or care who signed the petition”. It really isn’t so much that we want to be shielded from our fellow citizen, though we should, it really is about government knowing who and what we are aligned with. I think people like Kadaffi and Mubarak would love to know who the dissidents were before an uprising. Maybe they should have put out a petition to see who was upset with their policies and then seek them out? It is easier to run a tyranny than a democracy. So it is always important to secure our privacy and secrecy.
Any petitions to —
Put the U.S.A. under the total control of the UK monarch or a Hitler clone or a Stalin clone — or even the Chinese commie regime ???
Repeal the U.S.A. Bill of Rights ???
Repeal the 13th, 14th, 15th, etc. amendments ???
Inquiring minds need to know — and act accordingly.
# 1 Would King George III have loved to have known who was circulating ANY anti-KGIII stuff in the American colonies in 1761-1776 ???
Would the slave regimes in the U.S.A. have loved to have known who was circulating ANY anti-slavery stuff in such regimes in 1776-1865 ???