Now, the question’s supporters must collect 65,825 signatures from registered voters, and approval from 25 percent of state lawmakers to get the question on the 2008 ballot.

Lang, 42, said the name, street address, hometown and ZIP code of everyone who signs the petition will be posted on the Web site KnowThyNeighbor.org.

“Everyone’s scrambling to know who in their town would sign this,” Lang told the Boston Herald. “And this Web site will give gay people the tools to know, to defend themselves and their families, to let them go neighbor-to-neighbor and say, ‘I don’t appreciate your signing this.’”

“I’m going to be aggressive personally,” he said. “I want to know that the people I do business with are not against (gay marriage). This is going to be won by economics.”

The parallel to the Nuremberg Files, that website listing abortion doctors, is obvious, as are the equally insidious motives hidden behind the “right to know.”

Note what Lang and Westerhoff want to stop so much that they’re willing to harass private citizens: not abolishing gay marriage but putting it up to a vote.

Their website, KnowThyNeighbor.org, alludes to the Golden Rule, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Is the irony lost on them? What would they think if “extremists” published a website with lists of homosexuals?

It seems as though their attack is against more than just the issue of the referendum; it’s an attack on the democratic process: they want to replace the civic goods of neighborly “love” and free elections with the intimidation of “knowledge” and judicial fiat.