HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. — An Orange County, Calif., attorney has filed a proposed ballot measure with the California Attorney General’s office asking voters to criminalize homosexuality in the state and impose a death penalty sentence.
The filing, submitted along with the required fee of $200, will allow attorney Matthew G. McLaughlin to begin the process of collecting the approximately 365,000 signatures needed to put the measure before California voters on an upcoming ballot, reports Raw Story.
The proposed “Sodomite Suppression Act” was filed by McLaughlin and received by the initiative coordinator at the Office of the Attorney General on Feb. 26, according to documents on file with the AG’s office.
Under McLaughlin’s proposal, “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.”
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“The People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”
Little is known about the petitioner or if his filing is on behalf of a client.
The filing indicates McLaughlin is an attorney from Huntington Beach, Calif., and records at the State Bar of California show that McLaughlin is on active status and licensed to practice law in the state.
He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California Irvine and his law degree from George Mason University School of Law in Virginia.
The address on file at the State Bar, and on McLaughlin’s filing, routes to a Mailbox Express store, however, not a law office.
In 2004, McLaughlin filed for a California ballot measure to put the King James Bible in the hands of public school students as a literary text.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, that same-sex sexual activity is legal in every U.S. state and territory, a decision cannot be overturned by a state ballot initiative.