The passing of proposition 8 and its ilk elsewhere has a lot of people down. A friend via her Facebook status, “thinks you shouldn’t be able to vote away civil rights.” Amen to that…got me thinking.
We have an Equal Protection Clause, but no Equal Rights Clause under the US Constitution yet. Which means that a majority vote in a state or local election can infringe upon the so-called “unalienable rights” of a minority. That isn’t democracy — that’s tyranny.
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Unsolicited commentary | Tagged: 2008 election, arbitrary exclusion, balance, case law, civil rights, constitutional law, constitutional rights, democracy, discrimination, elections, equal protection clause, equal rights clause, first they came..., majority, minority, popular vote, precedent, progress, proposition 8, tyranny, UDHR, UN, Universal Declaration of Human Rights | 
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Posted by ozob
Props to the good folks over at FiveThirtyEight.com. Not only did they construct an incredibly accurate model of the 2008 election — they use their statistical acuity for good and not evil.
Here’s the latest example: Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee wants to blame Latinos and black people for the passage of Proposition 8. Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Unsolicited commentary | Tagged: 2008 election, black, Dan Walters, evil, fivethirtyeight.com, good, homophobia, latinos, mangled statistics, Nate Silver, Obama, proposition 8, racism, Sacramento Bee, statistics, twisted logic, xenophobia | Permalink
Posted by ozob
the controlled release of diamonds 
the violence in all of us
December 23, 2008Haven Daley of the Associated Press reports:
[…] Read the rest of this entry »