California judge strikes down measure calling for the killing of gay people

State's attorney general told to disregard the initiative

(AP Images)

California’s attorney general has been told to ignore an initiative that called for the execution of anyone who engages in gay sex acts.

The so-called Sodomite Suppression Act was ruled unconstitutional by Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei, who told Attorney General Kamala Harris she did not have to process the initiative.

Matthew McLaughlin, a lawyer in Huntington Beach, California, submitted the violent anti-gay act in February, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“This proposed act is the product of bigotry, seeks to promote violence, is patently unconstitutional and has no place in a civil society,” Ms Harris said in a statement Tuesday.

Judge Cadei said allowing the initiative to advance would be “inappropriate, waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public and tend to mislead the electorate”.

Had the judge not blocked the Sodomite Repression Act, the attorney general would have been forced to allow Mr McLaughlin to seek the requisite 366,000 signatures that would have qualified the measure to go before California voters, the Times reported.

The proposal states that: “The abominable crime against nature known as buggery, called also sodomy, is a monstrous evil that Almighty God, giver of freedom and liberty, commands us to suppress on pain of our utter destruction even as he overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha.

“Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s wrath against us for the folly of tolerating wickedness, the people of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for the purposes of sexual gratification to put to death by bullets or by any other convenient method.”

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