Former California Gov. Jerry Brown (known affectionately as “Governor Moonbeam” during his heyday) is now the state’s attorney general. This is unfortunate since Attorney General Brown, purportedly the representative of fair and neutral law enforcement in the nation’s most populous state, has inserted himself in a most partial and biased way in Californians’ attempt to amend their state’s constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman.
How did Attorney General Brown descend from the equal and impartial justice he is sworn to dispense to the level of blatant bias in favor of same-sex marriage?
Prior to the California Supreme Court’s decision to go ahead and legalize same-sex marriage in June 2008 (in spite of the fact that an amendment initiative to prohibit such marriages in the state’s constitution was already on the ballot for the first Tuesday in November), the ballot title was “Limit on Marriage.” The first sentence of the summary then read, “Amends the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
Subsequent to the California Supreme Court’s decision, Jerry Brown altered the title to read: “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.” Attorney General Brown also altered the ballot summary to assert that the amendment would have a negative impact on the state’s economy because of “potential revenue loss, mainly sales taxes, totaling in the several tens of millions of dollars” in the coming years.
This assertion is based on the fact that same-sex couples are traveling from other parts of the country to legalize their relationships in California and thus, spending money in local hotels and restaurants.
So we are subjected to the spectacle of the state’s chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Jerry Brown, abandoning all pretense of impartiality and trying to stack the deck against his fellow citizens’ amendment initiative, known as Proposition 8.
Whatever happened to government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”?