I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Normally, a state’s attorney general defends state legislation. But in the case of California’s recently-passed Proposition 8, which took away the right to same-sex marriage after the California Supreme Court paved the way for it last spring, that’s not the case. California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, has asked the California Supreme Court to overturn the proposition.
“Proposition 8 must be invalidated because the amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification,” Brown said in a press release.
According to The Los Angeles Times, Brown initially said he would defend the proposition against challenges by gay rights activists. But after more closely examining the issue, he said he came to the conclusion that initiative amendments should not be allowed to overturn “inalienable” rights of people — which are what he said the Supreme Court previously determined marriage to be, for both gay and non-gay people alike.
In his brief filed with the court, the LA Times reported, Brown said to allow Proposition 8 to stand would amount to a “tyranny of the majority”:
…to use the ballot box to take away an “inalienable” right would establish a “tyranny of the majority,” which the Constitution was designed, in part, to prevent, he wrote. “For we are talking, necessarily, about rights of individuals or groups against the larger community, and against the majority — even an overwhelming majority — of the society as a whole.
Brown is a former California governor who is said to be considering another run for that office in 2010.
