After losing on Election Day, some supporters of gay marriage are using economic boycotts and Internet lists to focus ire on the financial backers of Proposition 8.
Some on the receiving end say the tactic amounts to a blacklist, a term that conjures memories of Hollywood’s refusal to hire screenwriters and others identified as communists in the late 1940s and 1950s.
“I just hate being pigeonholed as a hate monger or bigot,” says Robert Hoehn, who contributed $25,000 to the campaign for Prop 8, which amended California’s Constitution to exclude same-sex marriage. “I have friends in the gay community, and I don’t think any of them would say that.”
Hoehn has seen protesters outside his Carlsbad, Calif., car dealerships, his name and business have appeared on websites publicizing donors, and he has received “the most vitriolic kinds of e-mails, letters and phone calls.”
His discomfort is exactly what some have in mind.
