Huntington Beach attorney Matthew Gregory McLaughlin is testing California’s ballot initiative process after proposing the “Sodomite Suppression Act” in February. Although state officials say there is a slim chance that the proposal will make it on to the ballot, they have admitted that they have no authority to keep the bill off the ballot.

“While you might say that this initiative is ‘clearly’ illegal (and I would agree), the notion of what is or is not ‘clearly’ illegal is not always so cut and dried,” said election lawyer Tom Hiltachk.

“This one drips of evil, so the instinct is to say ‘Well, there’s got to be a way to avoid wasting everybody’s time,’ ” UC Davis law professor Vikram Amar told the Sacramento Bee. “But in the law we often have limitations that are built not for the easy cases but because we are worried about the hard cases.”

McLaughlin’s proposal is filled with harsh strictures against “the abominable crime against nature known as buggery,” as he states in the opening paragraph. “Any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification,” he says, should “be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

The bill not only calls for such a brutal death sentence for anyone who engages in homosexual activity, but also million-dollar fines for distributors of “sodomistic propaganda,” and banning gays from public office. The proposal is still in need of 365,880 signatures to make it on to the ballot.

“It’s terrifying and almost laughable in the same breath,” said Donald Bentz, executive director for the Sacramento LGBT Community Center. “It’s a little scary that that actually could happen and if it does get to the ballot, the firestorm that this is going to create and the hate crimes that could result from that.”

A group of state lawmakers filed a complaint against McLaughlin last week, requesting that the state bar review his membership for violating a “good moral character” clause. “I think that’s problematic under the First Amendment because he’s not acting as a lawyer when he’s submitting these proposals, he’s acting as a citizen,” said Amar.

The California Attorney General’s Office is currently reviewing the proposal. To block the bill completely, according to Amar, the attorney general would need to file a lawsuit against it and get the courts to agree that the measure violates the Constitution.