Anonymity in Pubic Debate
The Senate has been debating the DISCLOSE act which would require groups that participate in political debates to release lists of all donors over a certain dollar amount. I was a big proponent of this sort of disclosure regimen until I saw the reprisals against people who supported California's Proposition 8, a measure to define marriage exclusively as a male-female union.
I was late to the party. The NAACP was an opponent of full disclosure before I was. I read the following in an article by David French at National Review.
I was late to the party. The NAACP was an opponent of full disclosure before I was. I read the following in an article by David French at National Review.
In fact, not only was anonymity crucial in our nation’s founding, but it also played a key role in ending segregation. In 1958, the Supreme Court decisively rejected Alabama’s attempt to force the NAACP to publicly identify its “members” and “agents” as a condition for continuing its operations in the state. After the NAACP demonstrated that its members had been exposed to, among other things, “economic reprisal, loss of employment, [and] threat of physical coercion,” the Court held that “inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.”
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