Jerry Brown Violates His Oath of Office

California Attorney General and former Governor Jerry Brown wants to be governor again in 2010, and as a knee-jerk liberal, he's a scary guy to have in any sort of power. When the voters passed Prop 8 Brown, as Attorney General, was duty bound to defend that measure from the many challenges brought against it. He has decided he'd rather be governor again than do the job he swore to do:

SAN FRANCISCO — The California attorney general has changed his position on the state's new same-sex marriage ban and is now urging the state Supreme Court to void Proposition 8.

In a dramatic reversal, Attorney General Jerry Brown filed a legal brief saying the measure that amended the California Constitution to limit marriage to a man and a woman is itself unconstitutional because it deprives a minority group of a fundamental right. Earlier, Brown had said he would defend the ballot measure against legal challenges from gay marriage supporters.

But Brown said he reached a different conclusion after studying the state Constitution.

"It became evident that the Article 1 provision guaranteeing basic liberty, which includes the right to marry, took precedence over the initiative," he said in an interview Friday night. "Based on my duty to defend the law and the entire Constitution, I concluded the court should protect the right to marry even in the face of the 52 percent vote."

Brown, who served as governor from 1975 to 1983, is considering seeking the office again in 2010. After California voters passed Proposition 8 on Nov. 4, Brown said he personally voted against it but would fight to uphold it as the state's top lawyer.

He submitted his brief in one of the three legal challenges to Proposition 8 brought by same-sex marriage supporters. The measure, a constitutional amendment that passed with 52 percent of the vote, overruled the state Supreme Court decision last spring that briefly legalized gay marriage in the nation's most populous state.

Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, called the attorney general's change of strategy "a major development."

"The fact that after looking at this he shifted his position and is really bucking convention by not defending Prop. 8 signals very clearly that this proposition can not be defended," Minter said.

Baloney. All Brown's move does is ensure us that he's an office-grubbing politician first and a defender of the voters last. His support for the legal challenges is a sop to the lefties that opposed Prop 8 and he thinks it will help him get elected in 2010 - despite the fact that a majority of voters supported the measure. In typical liberal fashion it proves that he is unable to follow the law if his own personal beliefs are contradictory.

He's unfit to be Attorney General or anything else in California government.

The gay "rights" crowd has really played this whole thing very badly. When they lost the election they decided to personally attack individuals who had supported Prop 8 with donations, and tried to make the Mormon Church the bad guys by protesting and even vandalizing church locations. One thing Prop 8 did not do is invalidate existing gay marriages, and had the opponents simply accepted the will of the voters and worked through the system to create a new measure of their own there probably wound not have been a challenge to those existing marriages.

However, the petulant protests and legal challenges have resulted in a new challenge from the Prop 8 supporters to nullify all 18,000 gay marriages which took place between June 17 and election day. They brought this on themselves, and if that challenge is upheld, they will have themselves to blame for wiping out the legality of all those marriages. A mature response might have avoided all that.