A public school is an a public accommodation which must treat us all equally.

Likely you’d have figured that that that statement was so obviously true that I’m an idiot for writing it.

But, in a sense, it only became true in New Mexico today (January 23), when the New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously decided the point, tossing out an erroneous 1981 decision that UNM was not a “public accommodation,” as that term is used in the New Mexico Human Rights Act.

The new case arose from a Halloween event in which their Advanced Placement English teacher allegedly cut three inches off one Native American girl’s braid and called another “a bloody Indian.” Albuquerque Public Schools argued, as lawyers will, that APS was not a public accommodation. The trial court bought that, and dismissed the case; but the Court of Appeal overruled that, and the Supreme Court agrees. (Lawyers will note that the Court of Appeals “distinguished” the 1981 UNM case, but the Supreme Court explicitly overruled it.)

I note the decision not merely for its irony, but for the distinction between our courts’,, and our state government’s, willingness to consider candidly our sorry history in such matters; and to be glad we do not live in Florida or Texas, and have some protection against the possible abuses at the hands of our federal government.

Said the court, “ The NMHRA’s protections against numerous forms of discrimination must be read against the backdrop of this state’s unfortunate history of race-based discrimination, including that history transpiring within our public schools.” Noting that our New Mexico Constitution provides for education for all children, and that, “Children of Spanish descent in the state of New Mexico shall never be denied the right and privilege of admission and attendance in the public schools . . . but shall forever enjoy perfect equality with other children in all public schools and educational institutions of the state.” For a lot of the 20^th Century, that simply was not true for Native American kids.

In judicial language, despite such constitutional protections, “New Mexico schools have been used to further efforts of assimilation and cultural erasure among Native American and Hispanic children” and that historians have written that our schools sought to force “assimilation through education ‘that intentionally sought to destroy their cultural ways of life.’”

Political point: can you imagine the governor or attorney-general of Florida or Texas writing that? Rather, we’re seeing directives that such things not even be spoken of in those states’ public schools.

Personal point: I’ve talked with a Navajo long-distance runner whose father taught himself long-distance running as a kid, racing home after escaping from the schools to which our state sent him to learn not to be Navajo any more. I also recall my friend Fred Johnson, a Dineh student here in 1970, whose required ten-minute film to pass Buddy Wanzer's filmmaking course was a very moving study of his daughter, juxtaposing the loud chaos of a morning here, and on a local schoolbus, with the quieter strains of a morning at home.

Justice Briana Zamora’s concurrence correctly notes that while Brown v Board of Education held in 1954 that the segregation of public schools based on race was unconstitutional, it was 41 years later, in 1995, that a federal court explicitly held that that applied to children on the Navajo Nation.

Another reason I’m glad I’m in New Mexico.

                                – 30 --

[ oops - thought i'd published this y/d, sunday, but apparently i didn't quite do that.]

[The above column appeared Sunday, 26 January, on the Las Cruces Sun-News website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

No News Is Good News If the Alternative Is Armed Insurrection

This week’s news included our first human bird-flu death and no violent effort to overthrow the government.

Outgoing VP Kamala Harris quietly presided over certification of Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. Presidency. That’s always a yawner. But, four years ago, a losing Presidential candidate orchestrated a plot to stay in office through fraud and chicanery, aided by a violent protest that killed five police officers and threatened the lives of congessfolk trying to do their constitutional job, including that losing candidate’s vice-president. Imagine trying to explain that to Dwight David Eisenhower! Then explaining that the guy was elected again.

He’ll reportedly pardon folks convicted of crimes in the failed coup effort. You elect a somewhat demented narcissist, then even violence against our country is acceptable if committed with admiration for the narcissist. An event almost unimaginable in U.S. history occurred, on national TV. The shifting sands of memory have already covered it.

This year, no violence. No threat of violence.

I can’t tell if the first human death from bird flu will someday loom large in memory, or be a trivia answer. (I’d bet on the latter, but for months I’ve washed my hands after filling bird-feeders.)

In 2016, the new president economized by abandoning the small office in charge of monitoring the world for possible pandemics, such as ebola and swine flu, and responding quickly. In 2019-20, that president denied that COVID-19 was any big deal. Perhaps coincidentally, the U.S., 4.24% of the world’s population, suffered by May 2020 28.6% of the global deaths from the pandemic, 103,700 out of 362,705. Maybe reporting anomalies contributed; and maybe some of the initial sanitizing recommendations proved excessive. But Mr. Trump was pooh-poohing masks, and advising folks to try weird remedies, and now wants to appoint an anti-vax nutcase to oversee such matters. Trump’s term ended in January, 2021. By April 2024, the death figures were just over seven million worldwide and 1,219,487 [a reasonable 5.7%] here.

The Salk vaccine stemmed the polio epidemic of seventy years ago. Polio has vanished. Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s lawyer has brought lawsuits seeking to undo approval, and even do a new placebo test – not vaccinating some kids, to see what happens. Sorry, but given 70 years’ scientific history, that just sounds dangerously goofy. Kennedy also helped undermine Samoan confidence in the measles vaccine, helping Samoa suffer a deadly measles outbreak.

In 2020, Kennedy said that much of the pandemic “feels very planned to me,” adding that “if you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes.” Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s choice to heat the National Institute of Health, said in April 2020 that the pandemic would be less deadly than flu. FDA appointee Marty Makary said in February 2021 that COVID would be “mostly gone by April.” Their ideologies dominated their “scientific” pronouncements. Not ideal behavior by the folks who’ll decide how we handle the next big health problem. Or biological warfare against us.

Meanwhile Mr. Trump, like an Alzheimer's patient, grabs at everything he sees. His threat to snatch the Panama Canal and Greenland, for our security, undermines alliances. Refusing to rule out violence tells Xi and Putin that if they feel they need Taiwan or Ukraine, that’s cool. Even Trump’s own former National Security Advisor says that’s dumber than a fencepost.

Very few of my future Sunday columns will mention the White House. It’s too easy a target.

                                         – 30 –

 

[The above column appeared Sunday, 12 January, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website, as well as on the KRWG website under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]

[In 2025, very few of my Sunday columns will discuss Mr. Trump. We have plenty of urgent issues locally worth discussing; and Washington is both too easy a target to be much fun [see above column] and a little fruitless, because folks mostly believe what they believe and ain’t listening.

However, a Facebook exchange today set me thinking on what’s maybe an odd course: Along with keeping an eye on Mr. Trump, and resisting excesses if and as we can, we should be grateful we are not him. Most of us, clearly including Joe Biden, grew up in families that taught us some basic stuff about loving and being loved, living our lives but considering others’ needs too, and basic decency. Mr. Trump was taught that it was a dog-eat-dog world, and one’s task was to make as much money as you could off anyone else you met, and you got laughed at if you didn’t. All his annoying traits, some trivial, such as cheating at golf and comically exaggerating crowd sizes, and humiliating anyone who disagrees with him, are indeed annoying; but each speaks eloquently of his need to do that sort of shit, and I can think of few people I know who would choose to be in Donald’s wounded mind if they could avoid it. It must be hell!

So, while maintaining compassion for all those he hurts and insults, save some for him. ]

New Mexico Supreme Court Confirms Localities Can't Outlaw Abortions

No big surprise here, but on 9January, as I watched all that wonderful snow float earthward, the New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously rendered a decision that’s important but also as obvious as the snow falling in the direction Newton would anticipate: that the vicious efforts by Hobbs, Clovis, Lea County, and Roosevelt County to outlaw abortions was illegal and ineffective. Despite a laundry list of goofy sounding rightwing “friends of the court,” the justices said that the ordinance, as it was intended to, conflicts with state law, and that the state statute controls. The court did not consider or decide the deeper question of the ordinance’s constitutionality, because there’s a basic procedure rule that if you don’t have to decide a constitutional question, because some other issue is sufficient to decide the case, you don’t look at or opine on the constitutional question.

The case was formally known as State ex rel. Torrez v Board of County Commissioners for Lea County, et al., Docket # S-1-SC-39742 (1/9/2025)

The ordinances, in the court’s words, “create blanket prohibitions on the mailing or receipt of any abortion-related instrumentality.” Those prohibitions, the court concluded, “plainly conflict with provisions of the Reproductive and Gender-Affirming Health Care Freedom Act (the Health Care Freedom Act or the Act), NMSA 1978, §§ 24-34-1 to -5 (2023)” and several other statutes.

Therefore the effort failed.

The court reviewed the history, starting with the 2022 US. Supreme Court decision in Hobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215, 360-61 (2022), overturning Roe v. Wade, 410 US. 113 (1973), and declaring the authority to regulate abortions a state issue. Today’s opinion noted the accuracy of the Hobbs dissenting justices’ prediction that Hobbs would encourage just such in-state battles as this one.

In response to Hobbs, New Mexico’s Legislature revisited the decades-old state criminal statute banning abortions unless deemed necessary to protect a woman from death or “serious and permanent bodily injury. In 2021 the Legislature repealed the old ban and its criminal penalties, removing legal bars to abortion in New Mexico. Further legislative and executive actions broadened access. Most notably, the the Health Care Freedom Act, stating New Mexico’s modern desire to protect women's’ rights to access reproductive health care in New Mexico, went into effect in June 2023.  It prohibits any public body, entity, or individual from interfering with access to reproductive or gender-affirming health care and imposes penalties for violations of the Act’s provisions. The two county commissions and the two city councils had willfully violated that law.

Thus, today's decision should come as no surprise.

However, it confirms the importance (disputed at the time) of formally rescinding the old law and enacting a fresh one, bringing a more modern and compassionate approach to the issue. 

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