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.
Sen. McSorley speaks to supporters
Approximately 100 people turned up at the New Mexico state capital Monday to support domestic partnership bill (SB 183) expected to be heard in the Senate this week.
Reps. Brian Egolf and Mimi Stewart and Sens. Cisco McSorley and Gerald Ortiz y Pino joined Equality New Mexico Interim Executive Director Jordon Johnson and Episcopalian priest Daniel Gutierrez in support of the bill, which would offer domestic partners rights similar to those of married couples.
“This will go through the House,” Egolf assured the crowd, “the Senate is where the fight is.”
Stewart told the crowd that because the Senate didn’t want language equating domestic partnership to marriage, that language was removed from the 800-plus page bill.
The next step for SB 183 is a Tuesday afternoon joint committee meeting of the Senate Judiciary and Senate Public Affairs committees. McSorley, in anticipation of lengthy debate, asked his colleagues in the Senate to attend the Tuesday meeting in order to allow supporters to be present and to avoid redundant questions in future meetings.
Janice Bruce-Hightower, who told The Independent that she met her partner 10 years after it became legal for blacks and whites to marry, was concerned that if her partner of 27 years were hospitalized she wouldn’t have the right to visit her.
For James Brethour, this issue and the rights of property after death were what brought him to the capitol today.
“For married couples property is transfered automatically,” he said, “but I have no guarantees of that, or even of being able to visit the hospital.”
While legal concerns were on the minds of many of the attendees, acceptance of LGBT people was the main motivation for rally organizer Wenda Watch. “The big challenge we face is fear,” Watch told The Independent. “People are scared that their kids are going to get beat up like Matthew Shepard did. They think their kids will choose this lifestyle, and it really is fear for children. They think allowing domestic partnership is one more step to making it okay to be LGBT.”
Nearly half of those in attendance in support of domestic partnership were young people. High school students Lilly Lawrence-Metzler, Emerald Lueras and Jasmine Ramsey, and college student Kody Moore, came to the rally as representatives of local queer-straight alliances. Though years away from being worried about healthcare costs and rights, Lawrence-Metzler told The Independent that the students came because they felt everyone deserves equal rights.
“We’re lucky enough to go to schools that are accepting,” Lawrence-Metzler said, “but not everyone our age has that.”
Father Gutierrez asked that anyone still opposed “look into the eyes of each one of us to the simple compassion that drives each of us,” adding that “Christ came to release the oppressed,” and saying “there is no better example than here.”
The New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops has been the bill’s largest opposition.
