Reports: Seattle PI
A man associated with a right wing group that has prominently criticized an independent group of LGBT activists in Washington for saying they would republish public documents on a web site has filed a request to get non-public names of city employees who belong to an LGBT support group.
The man’s request is supported by a prominent anti-gay activist who has, nonetheless, deemed the LGBT activists’ use of public records to be a form of “intimidation”.
In April, Seattle City Light employee Philip Irvin, 58, filed a request with Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) for the names of employees who are members of the department’s “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning and Friends” group.
Irvin has long been opposed to the LGBT group at City Light, a municipally-owned electric utility. In May 2006, members of the LGBT affinity group filed a complaint against Irwin with the Equal Employment Opportunities commission, because of an email he sent from his city account complaining in offensive language about an invitation that the LGBT group sent to other City Light employees asking them to join the group at the annual Seattle Pride parade.
A note from Irvin about the complaint was posted by Gary Randall on May 25, 2006 on his “Faith & Freedom” website. Randall is now leading the effort to pass Referendum 71, a ballot measure that would strip out the recently passed additions to the state’s domestic partnership laws.
Seattle Public Utilities gave Irvin some of the public records that he requested about the group, but did not give him a list of members, or other items, including meeting sign-in sheets, that he had requested and that would have shown who belongs to the group.
Charges of ‘hypocrisy’ fly as Seattle LGBT employees try to block release of their names [contd.]
After receiving Irvin's request in early May, city public-disclosure officers notified the employees whose identities would be released, the Seattle PI reports. In response, some of those employees sued the city, asserting that state public-records law demand their identities be withheld.
In a May 29 letter to Irvin, SPU Director Ray Hoffman, wrote, “I have however been contacted by an attorney on behalf of individual(s) named in the requested records that he is filing an injunction to prevent their release. Therefore I am not releasing the remaining items until learning whether the effort to enjoin the release of the records is upheld.”
City Attorney Tom Carr has argued on behalf of Irvin and his request. Carr told the PI that despite his personal view to the contrary, he believes state law mandates that the information be released.
Carr argued that no relevant exemptions exist in the state open-records law to protect the identities of public employees participating in such groups, according to the PI.
If Carr is right about state law, then Irvin’s request will probably require the city to release names of members of any employee affinity group if it gets a request to do so.
Plaintiffs' attorney Cecilia Cordova argues that the privacy of the city employees is at issue. “The risk is privacy, and that's something that is taken very seriously by the court system,” she told the PI.
The Superior Court Judge John Erlick, who issued the temporary injunction, will begin to hear testimony on the case this week.
This is where it all gets odd: Irvin’s request for information under the state’s public disclosure laws is being celebrated by the same right wing activist who has spent the past two weeks excoriating a group of LGBT activists who have said they will transfer names of petition signers from a publicly available database to another web-based database.
In a post made this year on June 3, Randall calls the injunction obtained against release of employee names an example of “Homosexual hypocrisy at City Light”.
Why “hypocricy”?
Randall lumps the City Light employees together with a a group of activists calling themselves “WhoSigned.org” and who are unaffiliated with the state’s major LGBT-rights organizations.
WhoSigned.org announced last month that the group would publish on its website the names of those who sign Randall’s petition for Ref. 71. They will do so only after the Secretary of State makes the names public as he’s required to do by state law.
With the help of several different LGBT activists in the state who have echoed Randall’s criticism of WhoSigned.org, Randall has been successful during the past several weeks in getting the group’s proposed tactic portrayed by editorialists throughout the state as a form of “intimidation”. Some editorials have even called for a change to state law to restrict access to the names of petition signers – making it more difficult in the future to assure that independent verification of initiative signatures is possible.
In his June 3 post, Randall calls the intended re-release of the public records by WhoSigned.org “intimidation in its cruelest form”, but he also castigates the City Light employees for trying to keep their own names private.
Randall then prints a note from Irvin who writes,
There seems to be rank hypocrisy among the gay community. Publishing names and addresses on a website of those who oppose them by signing a petition is fair game but releasing the names of those who use city resources to promote their agenda causes them to howl. Call me a homophobe if you want to but I don't think the City should fund a secret gay employees group.
Irvin’s public information request was made before WhoSigned.org announced its plans.
More to the point, however, is that the real critique of the WhoSigned.org proposal is that it’s redundant and unnecessary since Washington’s public records law – and the state’s effective use of web-based databases – already provides the same information. Irvin, on the other hand, is asking for information that has not previously been made public.
If it’s possible, as Randall asserts, that petition signers might be subject to “intimidation” when their names are published by the Secretary of State and WhoSigned, then it’s even more likely that those whose names Irvin wants released could be intimidated.
And yet, Randall supports Irvin in his request.
Although it’s impossible to know what individual members of the City Light group might think about the WhoSigned group (if they think about it at all), the City Light employee group has no known relationship with WhoSigned.org. It’s an incredible stretch to call their request for an injunction based on privacy concerns hypocritical because of something an unrelated group plans to do.
It is, however, hypocritical for Randall personally to promote an associate’s use of public disclosure laws while calling someone else’s use of those same laws “intimidation in its cruelest form”.
Source: Gay city employees fight to block release of their identities | Seattle Post Intelligencer