Dear Editor:

The day before the California Supreme heard oral arguments to overturn Proposition 8 I attended the rally downtown to show my support for it’s repeal. I was surprised to find not our current District 3 councilman leading the rally, but his former opponent Steven Whitburn. Further the rally was represented by every level of government including representatives from the federal level (Feinstein, Boxer, and Davis), the state level (Saldana and Kehoe), and some from the local level including Mayor Sanders himself and former Councilwoman Toni Atkins and her wife. Who was absent?

Lastly, where was the Amicus Brief on behalf of the City of San Diego? Briefs were filed by most major cities in the state, ours being absent. Why wasn’t this brief brought before the city council at a time when it would have received the most support?

Someone please tell me where our councilman is and how he is advocating for our community.

Paul Zoubek

Dear Editor:

You are right Mr. Garcia we cannot trust Police Chief William Landsdowne. Remember that when he addressed the LGBT community at the coffee house in Hillcrest about four years ago. He stated that he was not going to send undercover police into our businesses. At the same time he was doing it at the 2200 Club. As both the courtroom testimony and the articles in the GLT verify the undercover police were only looking for sexual activity between consenting adults. Yes both former city attorney Michael Aguirre and Police Chief William Landsdowne made their bed and now they get to lie in it. Aguirre was kicked out of office partly because of his blatant lies to the LGBT community and not one of us will ever believe Landsdowne again. Landsdowne was ignoring violent crime on the streets of Hillcrest and North Park while sending naked police officers, clad only in towels, into our bathhouses which had been there for over twenty years. The rights that we have fought for are very fragile and can be yanked away by less than honest city officials on a multitude of fabricated charges. An honest reputation is something the San Diego Police Department has never had and never earned.

Charlie Sharples

Dear Editor:

How right you are Frank Garcia. Yes San Diego Police Chief William Landsdowne now says he cannot justify the use of his staff to provide vice cops targeting gay men. Yes that is exactly what our less than honest chief did at the 2200 Club. He had undercover officers sit in the private adults only club, two at a time, looking for consensual sexual activity between adults. At the same time rampant street crime was occurring in the same neighborhood. The uniformed officers were coming by the office asking for the 2200 Club’s outdoors surveillance tapes to assist them with street crime. That is right the police were more concerned with what was going on in the club than the violent crime outside. Is it any wonder that the GLBT community has lost all respect for Chief Landsdowne and his department. One thing we all know for sure is that you cannot believe anything that he says. Now Landsdowne has closed the 2200 Club and driven all of those sexuality active people into the restrooms in Balboa Park. Our community had so much hope for our city when Landsdowne was hired and moved here from San Jose. It turned out that he is just another crooked cop who has no idea where the real priorities are in assigning police officers.

Juan Gonzalez

Dear Editor:

I have problems with how last week’s poll question on Carl DeMaio was framed. I believe this is a legitimate question for any and every City Councilor and local politician. It is one of the most important issues of our time. As a marriage equality activist, I certainly hope that Mr. DeMaio would answer the question and support us, but the same applies to the other politicians in CA. Having spent a lot of time on the streets and in the neighborhoods talking to people about the issue (try getting signatures from drunk people downtown at Mardi Gras for example) I’ve met a number of people from the LGBT community (and of course people who self-describe as “straight”) who do not support marriage equality or marriage at all for that matter. My problem with Mr. DeMaio on this issue, is that he spoke at a Center Community breakfast, a surprise appearance before the November election, and spoke of his support for our LGBT community and issues to much applause, my own as well. Now I expect him to support us or to explain why he does not weigh in on an important issue like marriage equality, just as I would for any other public official who made a similar declaration. In short, why must the onus only be placed on a gay politician and not on all of them, regardless of sexual orientation? Much worse I believe was Marty Block soliciting and receiving much support from the LGBT community before the election, but then refusing to support us on a crucial vote in the state assembly. Now that’s a potential subject for a future weekly poll!

Charlie Pratt

University City

Dear Editor:

Contrary to Dr. Delores Jacobs’ March 26 column, the likelihood that the California Supreme Court will uphold Proposition 8 has nothing to do with the justices having “lost their courage.” What they’ve lost is their ability to read the California state constitution in violation of the will the voters of this state have now expressed twice — in March 2000 and again in November 2008

Jacobs writes that “America has been loath to put the basic and fundamental rights of its citizens on the ballot.” Actually, America has continually given majorities effective veto power over the rights of minorities. The majestic guarantees of racial equality in the Fourteenth Amendment became virtual dead letters from the 1870’s, when political pressures ended Reconstruction and drove the South’s African-American population back into virtual slavery, to the 1950’s and 1960’s when African-Americans fought back and mobilized enough white support to get the political system to act.

If Jacobs had watched the Supreme Court hearing on Proposition 8 start to finish — as I did — she’d have seen the frustration in the faces of the four justices who signed the marriage equality opinion in the first place as they searched in vain for any reason in the California constitution not to uphold Prop. 8 as constitutional. The blunt fact is the California constitution sets almost no limits on the majority’s ability to amend it by popular vote. The voters of California would have the right to re-enact the state’s ban on interracial marriage if the U.S. Supreme Court hadn’t struck down such laws as a violation of the federal Constitution.

As I wrote in my Zenger’s Newsmagazine editorial on the Prop. 8 hearings, “The case against Proposition 8 was based on a kind of wishful thinking all too common in the modern American Left: the idea that because something is unjust, therefore it must be unconstitutional.” The message we should take away from Prop. 8 is that we will not win marriage equality by relying on the courts; we will win it by changing the hearts and minds of the people to accept it — and so far the Right has done a far better job of organizing public support for their views on marriage equality, reproductive freedom and the other so-called “culture issues” than we have.

The discussions we need to be having in our community are the ones about coalition-building and rethinking our strategy, asking ourselves whether we’d be willing to accept marriage rights under some other name and how we’re going to overcome the broad-based religious objection among many Americans (including many people of color who are otherwise progressive) to calling same-sex relationships “marriages.” Instead what Dr. Jacobs is bringing us is a “town-hall meeting” on April 2 with some of the same people who ran the badly bungled No on 8 campaign in the first place — which is rather like setting up a financial seminar on “How to Survive the Recession” and inviting the bonus recipients from AIG to run it.

Mark Gabrish Conlan

Dear Editor:

In a previous issue from march 19th of the glt, you choose to have a preview of the slasher, horror flick “The Last House on the Left” . Of all the new movies that are coming out, I was personally offended, that your choice was to include a cheesy, gory trash movie, that cannot possibly ad ANY kind of value to any of the GLBT readership, even being reviewed! Have some class in the movie section, please! At least the movie got a bad review!

Bjorn Palenius in South Park.