A story in the business section of the New York Times reports perhaps surprisingly widespread concern from good-government types about the misuse of donor disclosure laws to intimidate and harass individuals who gave money to support Prop. 8:

Joseph Clare, a San Francisco accountant who donated $500 to supporters of Proposition 8, said he had received several e-mail messages accusing him of “donating to hate.” Mr. Clare said the site perverts the meaning of disclosure laws that were originally intended to expose large corporate donors who might be seeking to influence big state projects. “I don’t think the law was designed to identify people for direct feedback to them from others on the other side,” Mr. Clare said. “I think it’s been misused.” Many civil liberties advocates, including those who disagree with his views on marriage, say he has a point. They wonder if open-government rules intended to protect political influence of the individual voter, combined with the power of the Internet, might be having the opposite effect on citizens. “These are very small donations given by individuals, and now they are subject to harassment that ultimately makes them less able to engage in democratic decision making,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California. THANKS to eightmaps.com, the Internet is abuzz with bloggers, academics and other pundits offering potential ways to resolve the tension between these competing principles. One idea is to raise the minimum donation that must be reported publicly from $100, to protect the anonymity of small donors. Another idea, proposed by a Georgetown professor, is for the state Web sites that make donor information available to ask people who want to download and repurpose the data to provide some form of identification, like a name and credit card number. “The key here is developing a process that balances the sometimes competing goals of transparency and privacy,” said the professor, Ned Moran, whose undergraduate class on information privacy spent a day discussing the eightmaps site last month. “Both goals are essential for a healthy democracy,” he said, “and I think we are currently witnessing, as demonstrated by eightmaps, how the increased accessibility of personal information is disrupting the delicate balance between them.”

(Hat tip to Michelle Malkin)

Here’s the new face of the gay marriage movement: If we can hurt you, we will. If hurting you means hurting a whole unrelated business enterprise, and all its employees, because one person in it gave money to Prop 8–too bad. If you are an artist, and we can hurt you bad by blacklisting you, we will do that too.

I know many gay people and gay marriage activists are appalled by these tactics, but, like it or not, this is now the face of your movement. (If you can change that, please do; I can’t do it for you).

Full disclosure: The National Organization for Marriage California (my organization) is party to the lawsuit attempting to protect donors from this kind of intimidation. If you or anyone you know is getting hate mail, threats, or other acts of harassment, because you gave money to support marriage, please let me know: [email protected].