The lawyer behind the proposed “shoot the gays” initiative says he won’t fight Attorney General Kamala Harris’ lawsuit to keep the measure from circulating, but may instead demand that it be placed on the November 2016 state ballot without having to gather any signatures except his own.

A letter from attorney Matt McLaughlin, dated April 2, was disclosed Thursday in a court filing by Harris’ office indicating she would ask a Sacramento County judge to rule in her favor by default.

Harris, who is required to issue a title and summary to every proposed initiative whose sponsor has paid a $200 filing fee, sued in March for authority to deny circulation to a “patently unconstitutional” measure that, if approved by voters, would require the state to kill all gays and lesbians.

In his letter, McLaughlin said he would not respond to Harris’ lawsuit. “Costly litigation is not something that you may require me to incur prior to exercising my rights under both the California Constitution and the initiative statute,” he wrote to the attorney general’s office.

“Take notice that if your office and the California secretary of state refuse to clear the Sodomite Suppression Act for signature circulation, I may demand as remedy that it be placed on the election ballot directly,” he added.

Secretary of State Alex Padilla’s office said it was unaware of any mechanism to place a measure on the ballot other than the standard procedures of gathering at least 365,000 signatures of registered voters or, for certain types of laws, winning legislative approval. The only other route would be a lawsuit.

McLaughlin, an attorney since 1998 who practices law in Huntington Beach (Orange County), submitted his proposed initiative Feb. 26, along with the $200 filing fee. Declaring it is “better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath,” it would require that anyone who touches a person of the same gender for sexual gratification be put to death by “bullets to the head or by any other convenient measure.”

The initiative would also make it a crime, punishable by 10 years in prison and permanent expulsion from the state, to advocate gay rights to an audience that includes minors. It would authorize private citizens to step in as executioners if the state failed to act within a year.

McLaughlin tried to qualify an initiative in 2004 that would have added the King James Bible as a literature textbook in California public schools. He was quoted at the time as saying he was promoting classroom use of the Bible for its “rich use of the English language” and was not trying to indoctrinate students.

He has not given interviews on his current proposal and did not respond to a phone message Thursday.

Harris had faced a Monday deadline to issue a title and summary to the initiative. But a judge Thursday granted her an extension until June 25 while she seeks a default judgment.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @egelko