The Oregon Elections Division has finalized the assessment of a civil penalty of $535.20 against John Belgarde, the new Oregon Christian Coalition director as well as treasurer of recallvera.com, one of two groups that last summer sought to recall Portland Mayor Vera Katz. The penalty, finalized on May 11, 2004, is for failure to file timely and sufficient reports of contributions and expenditures as required by state law.
The fines are the outcome of a complaint filed in July 2003 by the Recall Vera Katz Committee, the competing recall group, after recallvera.com, formerly known as the Better Portland Alliance, filed a report with its prospective recall on June 6 that failed to disclose contributions and expenditures. (This complaint came only two weeks after the Elections Division had acted on an earlier complaint and had discontinued the BPA as a political committee because it was not properly formed under state law.)
Belgarde didn't file the required report until Oct. 13—eighty-nine (89) business days late—after ignoring several letters from Elections requesting information from him. In addition, Belgarde's second report, due on Sept. 19, was also filed on Oct. 13—sixteen (16) business days late, after a timely report had been rejected by the city auditor as insufficient.
The civil penalty is $100 for the first violation and $435.20 for the second. (A penalty of up to $10,000 could have been imposed due to the lateness of 89 days, but state law allows only a $100 maximum for a treasurer's first violation.) Although Belgarde continued to thumb his nose at Elections by ignoring correspondence from them, the penalties are now final. As of September 30, Belgarde still hasn't paid the fine. A second notice has been mailed to him giving him 30 days to pay. Unpaid fines are turned over to the Oregon Department of Revenue for collection.
The competing Recall Vera Katz Committee felt that Belgarde's right-wing group would misrepresent voter dissatisfaction with Mayor Katz as an endorsement of their pro-war, anti-transit agenda, which made the absurd claim that "Protesters are allowed to shut down the city when the Mayor agrees with their views." So the RVKC scrambled to file their recall petition first to steal Belgarde's thunder, focusing on the issue of police violence and saying, "If there's going to be a recall, it should be for the right reasons."
As the two recall groups were collecting signatures, Mayor Katz announced her decision to not seek another term, thus deflating the recall campaigns.
Belgarde opposed the First Amendment rights of peace activists, church people, and other concerned citizens to peaceably assemble to protest Bush's immoral and illegal mass-murder of innocent Iraqis, and now he opposes equal treatment of persons desiring to marry. It is hypocritical and offensive that he loudly accused citizens of breaking minor pedestrian laws when he himself flagrantly violates the requirements of state election law.
But Belgarde wasn't content to let his hypocrisy end there. In a Portland Mercury article titled "What's Up Belgarde's Butt? And, Do Hypocrisy and Bigotry Go Hand in Hand?" (3 June 2004), writer Phil Busse noted,
"One of the first arguments that same-sex opponents put forward was that Multnomah County officials violated the rules of fair play. When county commissioners announced in March they would begin handing out marriage licenses to same-sex couples, opponents jumped on the idea that the commissioners had violated the democratic process. They claimed the commissioners had made up their minds behind closed doors, cutting the public out of the decision-making process. By addressing the mechanics of the decision, opponents were able to temporarily ignore the more thorny moral and ethical arguments.
"But although opponents are demanding that county commissioners remain aboveboard in their decisions, apparently those same rules and ethics don't apply to them.
"… Not content to allow [the] traditional legal channels to flesh out the arguments, members of the religious right have pushed forward several efforts to outlaw same-sex marriages and to punish the county commissioners. None of those efforts are necessarily illicit, but they do smack of the very same vigilante legislation that same-sex marriage opponents claimed county commissioners had undertaken."
And a posting on the Portland Communique (communique.portland.or.us) dated 12 May 2004 notes that "further indications of tricky behavior on the part of Belgarde can be seen in [this photograph] which shows a signature gathering table for the [county commissioner] recall effort on church property. This may be a violation of the rules under which the tax-exempt church must play, since they are 'prohibited from participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.'
"Thankfully, we can tie this directly to Belgarde himself because of [this] photograph of Belgarde himself manning that self-same signature gathering table....
"He may be conducting political activity on property where it is not permitted.
"Clearly, his proven tendency to at least toy with the line of propriety appears to be intact."
And now there are all of the lies that Belgarde's "Christian" Coalition is telling the voters about Constitutional Amendment 36. (See "The Religious Right's Biggest Lies about the 'Defense of Marriage.'") Why does the religious right seem to believe that it's OK to break the Ninth Commandment in the "defense" of "traditional morality"?
Will Belgarde's hypocrisy never end?