Dear Editor:

As a Deputy Attorney General, I have a direct interest in who my next boss will be. While Robert DeKoven states that “we need an A.G. who tells it like it is,” he told it like it isn’t when arguing his condescending, groupthink prediction that “most gay and lesbian voters will be voting for ... Jerry Brown.”

DeKoven’s claims that Chuck Poochigian “is so to the right that he supports overruling Lawrence v. Texas,” and “may want California to again imprison gay men and lesbians for having consensual sex with other adults,” are inaccurate, irresponsible and speculative. Poochigian has offered no opinion on Lawrence, nor could he advocate its reversal, since this U.S. Supreme Court decision is the law of the land, which dismantles DeKoven’s still sillier, alarmist scenario of imminent imprisonments.

DeKoven’s claim that, “The reality is that the Rose Bird court would have approved same-sex marriage then, had the issue been presented. It wasn’t.” is simply untrue: the issue was presented to “the Rose Bird court” and, because Bird failed to decide the issue, to her successors after the voters retired Bird in 1986 for ignoring California’s death penalty law.

In 1985, I handled Coon v. Joseph, which sought to give gays in committed relationships the right to recover for emotional distress that Elden v. Shelden had earlier granted to their straight unmarried counterparts. Not only did Bird’s court agree to review Elden later in 1985, a sign of its inhospitability to such claims, but worse, Elden languished there, undecided, during Bird’s tenure. Perhaps Bird was too busy reversing death sentences to “approv[e] same-sex marriage then,” but Elden was not decided until 1988, when Bird’s sometime ally, Justice Stanley Mosk, wrote the opinion overturning it.

Moreover, Bird’s court undid the ruling in Garcia v. Superior Court, another decision like Elden, by first granting review but later dismissing it “as improvidently granted.” Then, Bird’s court failed to republish Garcia, destroying its precedential value and dissuading the court handling Coon from deciding it in our favor, certainly not the actions of gay-friendly jurists. Fortunately, the theory Coon first advanced is now the law.

Nor is Jerry Brown reliably supportive of gay marriage. Last month, Brown refused to support it, although he had earlier when pressed in an interview with a gay weekly. But even that reluctant support was a reversal from Brown’s earlier waffling, when he equivocated on the issue.

While professing that “We need an A.G. who tells it like it is,” DeKoven concludes by coyly declining to “go into detail here about [his] talk with Brown ... ‘til after the election.” Unlike DeKoven and Brown, Chuck Poochigian has been an active member of California’s Bar since admitted to it, and this difference shows as much in the formers’ disregard for truth and consistency as it does in Poochigian’s dedication to the rule of law. I won’t presume to tell others how to vote, but will make my choices based on facts, not on irresponsible, inaccurate speculation.

G. Michael German

Dear Editor:

I am writing this letter regarding something that caught my eye today. I am a smoker and as anyone knows there are few rights that are left to us. The latest is that there will no longer be smoking in parks. The thing that caught my eye was a parks department person in a parks department car driveing along smoking! I find it very funny that they are allowed to smoke in a city owned property, however I am patrolled by these same people that I can not smoke in a park. I guess that the best thing would be if we all stay in our homes and do whatever it is that we need to on the computer. Weather it be shopping looking for a partner or friend or whatever. Then that way we will be able to do whatever is to our likeing. And that way we will also lose whatever social skils that are left till we all become robots. Controled by the MAN FROM OZ!

Kevin McCarthy