Vox.com published a story Friday detailing California attorney Matthew McLaughlin and his ballot resolution to have California residents vote for the legalization to execute gay persons in the state. Yes, you read that first sentence correctly.

The “Sodomite Suppression Act” would go on the November 2016 ballot if it were to be passed, which it won’t because the California Supreme Court is expected to step in before anything goes much further. What might be even more troubling than the actual push for something so repugnant is how easy it could be to get something this extreme on a ballot in California. First, the bill sponsor, in this case, McLaughlin, must pay a $200 filing fee. Next, the state’s attorney general must, by law, give the proposed bill a name and summary. Finally, after 365,000 signatures in support of the bill, it will go on the ballot and the people of California will vote on it.

In the state of Iowa, there is only one way for a bill to appear on the voting ballot, and that is through a legislatively-referred constitutional amendment. That is “a constitutional amendment that appears on a state’s ballot as a ballot measure because the state legislature in that state voted to put it before the voters.” The process is well thought out and, for the good of the state, the best way to go about putting important topics in voters’ hands. The problem with California’s process is although Attorney General Kamala Harris may disagree with the proposition, she is required by law to put the bill through to the next step of petition signatures.

It’s absurd to think that even though the California Supreme Court is likely to step in, that something like this is even being proposed. You have a person of influence in a position to get the ball rolling on the execution of California citizens. In the bill, it states, “private citizens would be allowed to step in to act as executioners if the state didn’t within a year, meaning that the murder of gay and lesbian people would effectively be legalized.”

The very nature of this proposed ballot resolution calls back to not-so-far-past decades when African-Americans could be attacked by their racist fellow citizens, who would subsequently never face prosecution. History has shown that society does not look too kindly upon those individuals who held their own standard of living and so called “morals” above the basic right of human beings living in the United States to live their lives peacefully, only living in the skin they were born into.

This proposal is an embarrassment. There can be no question that this resolution should never reach the ballot and will hopefully be shut down by the California Supreme Court before the list of signatures can even be gathered. However, and more importantly, McLaughlin’s proposal represents a staggering inability of a portion of the American population to accept a way of life that they aren’t necessarily comfortable with.

No homosexual lawyer, to our knowledge, has proposed a law that asks to kill anyone who disagreed with their heterosexual way of life. Whenever the intolerance card is played, the automatic response from the opposition is to claim that it is intolerance in of itself to say that the opposing view cannot exist.