In Brief: AG gets injunction against alleged gay basher, MassResistance fails again

Civil rights injunction obtained against alleged South End gay-basher

Attorney General Martha Coakley's office on Nov. 3 obtained a civil rights injunction against Fabio Brandao, the 29-year-old Framingham man accused of participating in an anti-gay attack on four Boston residents in the South End in August.

Brandao, age 29, is prohibited from threatening, intimidating or coercing the victims or anybody else in the state on the basis of their sexual orientation. In addition, the injunction prevents Brandao from contacting or communicating with the victims and their families, and prohibits him from knowingly approaching within 500 feet of the victims and 500 yards of their workplaces or residences.

Violation of the injunction is a criminal offense, and can lead to a fine of up to $5,000 and two and a half years in a house of correction. If the victims are at all harmed, a fine of $10,000 and up to ten years in a state prison can be imposed.

Brandao's alleged attack on four friends, three of whom are gay men, on the morning of Aug. 24, 2008, led to the Attorney General's request for an injunction. According to the victims, Brandao and three other companions engaged in verbal and physical assaults, using anti-gay slurs as the friends walked down Columbus Avenue in Boston's South End. No other arrests have been made in the case.

Coakley sought the preliminary injunction against Brandao under the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act, which gives the Attorney General's office the power to obtain an injunction in cases where a victim has faced threats, intimidation or coercion because of a victim's membership in a specific category such as race, religion, sexual orientation or disability.

"Hate crimes are devastating to victims not just because of the immediate physical and emotional harm they cause, but because feelings of fear, anxiety and profound loss of personal security often last far longer than the incident," said Coakley in a Nov. 3 statement. "Beyond their impact on individual victims, hate crimes and other forms of bias-motivated activity are very detrimental to communities, and our office will continue to aggressively pursue these types of cases."

--Rachel Kossman

MassResistance fails to get 1913 reinstatement on the ballot

The effort by the anti-gay group MassResistance to reinstate the 1913 law has failed.

The group had spent the past two months collecting signatures to place a referendum on the 2010 ballot to reinstate the law, which the legislature and Gov. Deval Patrick repealed in July, but by the Oct. 29 deadline for gathering signatures MassResistance had only managed to collect one-third of the total needed. The 1913 law, which banned marriages between couples from out of state whose marriages would be void in their home state, had been used by former Gov. Mitt Romney to block most out-of-state same-sex couples from marrying in Massachusetts.

"The fact is this is a huge relief," said Arline Isaacson, co-chair of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus. "It's not that we were afraid we'd lose the ballot question, it's that it would have taken so many resources, so much money and time and effort to defeat it, it would have been all-consuming, and it would have taken those resources from other issues."

Brian McNiff, a spokesman for Secretary of State William Galvin, said MassResistance turned in roughly 10,500 signatures, far below the 33,297 needed to place it on the ballot.

MassResistance's campaign to reinstate the 1913 law was a long-shot effort. Both the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI) and the Catholic Church, two of the organizations that led the unsuccessful fight to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, declined to get involved in the signature-gathering process. Bay Windows received few reports of sightings of MassResistance petition gatherers, other than one sighting at the Burlington Mall.

MassResistance, led by anti-gay activist Brian Camenker, seems to have quietly admitted defeat in their campaign. All mention of the 1913 law repeal effort appears to have been removed from the group's website.

In an Oct. 31 e-mail to supporters Camenker blamed the failure to collect enough signatures on a wide range of people and organizations, from "homosexual activists" to MFI to the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, Camenker ultimately tried to put a little lipstick on his petered-out petition pig: "All in all, mostly positive things came from all this," he wrote.

--Ethan Jacobs