A California lawyer says he wants to legalize the execution of gay people, and there may be nothing the state’s attorney general can do to stop the proposal from moving forward.

Matt McLaughlin, an attorney in Huntington Beach, California, filed paperwork to bring his proposal, which would sanction the killing of gay and lesbian residents on the basis of their sexuality, before voters in November 2016.

The initiative, named the “Sodomite Suppression Act”, is awaiting further review by the office of the state attorney general, Kamala Harris, who does not appear to have the authority to block it. However, the measure is unlikely to reach voters, as the California supreme court can intervene to prevent measures that violate the state constitution from reaching the ballot.

The so-called “shoot the gays” proposal would mandate “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”. McLaughlin, a lawyer since 1998, declared in his proposal that it is “better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath”.

The initiative would also make it a crime to support gay rights, punishable by a $1m fine, up to 10 years in prison and expulsion from the state. It would be illegal to distribute “sodomistic propaganda” to “any person under the age of majority”. Being a “sodomite” or distributing “sodomistic propaganda” would disqualify a resident from serving in public office or public employment and from enjoying any public benefit.

In February, McLaughlin paid the $200 filing fee to put the initiative on the November 2016 ballot.



Once a sponsor has paid the required fee, the attorney general is directed under California law to prepare a circulating title and 100-word summary of the initiative before sending it to the secretary of state’s office for the signature-gathering period. The proposal would then need to collect at least 356,000 valid signatures within 180 days to qualify for the ballot, which is no easy task. It’s at that point that the supreme court can step in and keep the measure from appearing on the 2016 ballot.

“The statute is clear: that the office has to prepare a summary provided the proponents have paid $200 and followed the right procedures,” attorney Robert Stern, who authored the state’s 1974 Political Reform Act, which imposed expenditure reports for ballot measure campaigns, told the San Francisco Chronicle. Stern told the paper he is unaware of an instance in which the attorney general refused to issue a title and summary.

Harris is scheduled to prepare the title and summary by 4 May 2015.

State senator Ricardo Lara condemned the measure. “I support freedom of speech, but calling for state-sanctioned execution of a protected class calls into question the proponent’s character and judgment,” said Lara, who is gay, in a statement.

Lara, along with members of the legislature’s LGBT caucus, filed a formal complaint with the state bar against McLaughlin on the grounds that attorneys are supposed to demonstrate “good moral character”.

This isn’t McLaughlin’s first controversial measure. In 2004, he tried to qualify an initiative in 2004 that would have added the King James Bible as a textbook in California public schools, the LA Times reported in 2004.

“Even if you don’t believe its teachings, you’ll agree that it includes rich usage of the English language,” the paper quoted McLaughlin saying at the time. He defended the proposal as “good literature” and said it was not an attempt to indoctrinate students.