What Does Brendan Eich Have to Do With Campaign Disclosure?

Last week I wrote about former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich stepping down after the homosexual-lobby backlash that ensued after someone found out he’d donated money to California’s Proposition 8, a law that defined marriage as the union between one man and one woman. I urged Christians not to apologize, resign, or back down on these issues.

In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, the writer noted that President Barack Obama held similar views on marriage in 2012 and added this about campaign finance:

Mr. Eich’s treatment is another reason to rethink our views on campaign-finance disclosure laws. Years ago we supported reform that would deregulate campaign donation laws in return for immediate online disclosure.

But Justice Clarence Thomas made us think with his concurring opinion in 2010 in Citizens United that dissented on disclosure. “I cannot endorse a view of the First Amendment that subjects citizens of this Nation to death threats, ruined careers, damaged or defaced property, or pre-emptive and threatening warning letters as the price for engaging in ‘core political speech,’ the ‘primary object of First Amendment protection,'” he wrote.

Justice Thomas knows how Southern racists tried to subpoena NAACP membership lists for intimidation purposes in the Jim Crow era. The Supreme Court ruled this was a violation of the First Amendment right of association. In our current age of growing liberal intolerance, Justice Thomas’s warning takes on renewed meaning.

This is an important point and one I compare to racial preferences. I oppose the practice euphemistically known as affirmative action. Government policies must be colorblind not only because of the doctrine equality before the law. A government with the power to discriminate against one race that “benefits” another is a double-edged sword. That same government can turn its power against blacks. We must bar the government from discriminating based on race, period, no matter who benefits.

When the left supports and even encourages such backlashes against Christians and others who seek to protect marriage from being redefined to absurd levels, the same backlash, especially if codified in law, will turn against them.