California leads the nation in setting trends. And if its experience with Proposition 8 is any guide, Oregon and the rest of the country may have to restrict access to the records of individual campaign contributions for or against ballot measures.

This would be a 180-degree turnaround. Oregon has taken pains in recent years to make campaign contributions more easily accessible. The information now is available online almost as soon as a contribution is made. And in Oregon so far, we’re not aware of any serious problems because of it. Maybe that’s because we’re behind the times, which California is not.

There, voters in November passed an initiative, Prop 8, that restricts marriage to one man and woman each, a measure similar to one Oregon voters passed in 2004.

Opponents of the California measure did not take its defeat lightly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in November, “California has seen an outpouring of demonstrations ranging from quiet vigils to noisy street protests against Proposition 8, including rallies outside churches and the Mormon temple in Westwood as well as boycotts of some businesses that contributed to the Yes on 8 campaign.”

The Times said that many of those activities were organized by “young activists working independently on Facebook and MySpace. The grass-roots activism is a tribute to political organizing in the digital age, in which it is possible to mobilize thousands of people with a few clicks of a mouse.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John R. Lott and Bradley Smith have summarized some of the details. Lott is a research scientist at the University of Maryland and Smith is a former member of the Federal Election Commission.

They cite the case of Scott Eckern, director of a nonprofit musical theater company in Sacramento who had donated $1,000 to the Proposition 8 campaign. The theater, they write, was inundated with complaints and the director was forced to resign. The same happened to the director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, forced out because of picketing and a threatened boycott.

Also in Los Angeles, a manager of a restaurant gave a mere $100 to the campaign, triggering a boycott against the restaurant. The woman was forced out even though she had run the place for 26 years.

There was pressure the other way too. The Journal contributors cite the case of a San Diego real estate company who had given to the opponents. The pro-Prop 8 organization threaten to publicize the company name unless he donated to it as well.

Campaign contributions are listed publicly on the theory that we should know who pays for politicians’ campaigns and gains influence over them when they’re in office. But on ballot measures, nobody can buy a single voter, no matter how much money he donates to that kind of campaign.

We’ll have to figure out how to protect citizens’ right to participate in the democratic process. One way is to allow contributors to remain anonymous in ballot measure campaigns. (hh)