Rep. David Bates’ selective targeting of ‘unscrupulous people’
State Rep. David Bates (R-Windham) doesn’t think the state should ban phone number spoofing when used to commit fraud because dishonest people will ignore it. “I wonder why we would want to pass a law,” he told Garry Rayno, “when these are unscrupulous people with no regard for the law.”
No, the Windham Republican’s legislative career has focused on going after a different sort of “unscrupulous people.”
As chairman of the House Election Law committee in 2010, Bates supported “birther” legislation that would have prevented “unscrupulous people” from running for president.
House Bill 1245, as originally written, would have required candidates to present their long-form birth certificates when filing to run in the state’s presidential primary. Bates insisted the law did not target Pres. Obama. “I don’t know where the guy was born, I don’t care,” he told Talking Points Memo.
In 2012, Bates led the failed effort to prevent “unscrupulous people” from getting married. As sponsor of legislation to repeal marriage equality, he argued same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue because homosexuality is a lifestyle choice.
Bates told the Union Leader that “civil rights have to do with intrinsic qualities that a person just can’t change” such as race or gender. Homosexuality doesn’t meet that criterion, he said. “There’s no other example of any basis that we afford a civil right based upon a behavior or a preferential choice.”
After leaving the legislature at the end of 2012, Bates headed back to Concord in 2013 in an attempt to prevent “unscrupulous people” from voting. Bates lobbied against legislation that, he said, “castrated” existing voter ID requirements because it allowed students to use their college IDs as photo identification.