Caught in that kind of mire on a few big bills, Colorado lawmakers nevertheless managed in some key cases to get out from under the rhetoric and posturing to solve problems in laudable bipartisan fashion.

Education

Early literacy, Senate Bill 1238

The new law revs up efforts to help struggling kindergarten to third grade students begin reading. The bill takes a refreshingly holistic approach to addressing the problem, adding reading programs at schools, involving parents in instruction, providing additional training for teachers and holding back students who need extra time to catch up.

Fair discipline in schools, Senate Bill 046

Lawmakers on the right and left came together to rework Columbine-era zero-tolerance school discipline rules, which leaned on law enforcement, threw lots of kids out of school and disproportionately affected minority students. The new law gives school authorities increased discretion and training to handle discipline on a case by case basis and it eliminates mandatory expulsions, except in cases that involve firearms. The bill also sets up procedures to improve reporting, so that patterns of discipline can be better examined and problems with enforcement better addressed.

Data in support of the bill showed that kids being expelled in the state in great numbers under the old rules were much more likely to drop out and end up adrift and in and out of criminal corrections facilities and programs.

Money for education

Big news was that for the first time in three years, since the national recession hit full force, legislators did not slash the education budget in Colorado. As the state economy evened out and tax revenues increased, lawmakers kept the k-12 budget at last year’s roughly $5.3 billion level.

But it wasn’t all good news on the education front. Fraught immigration politics killed one of the more popular bills introduced this session.

Undocumented student tuition, Senate Bill 015

Despite wide support among the public and among higher education boards and administrators on the left and the right, Colorado’s proposal to offer not-quite in-state tuition rates to undocumented students who have graduated from a Colorado high school was voted down by hardline anti-illegal immigration members of the legislature. Opponents argued the “ASSET” bill would reward lawbreakers, draw illegal immigrants to the state and offer false hope to young people who would still be unable to work legally in the U.S. after graduating with college and university degrees.

States surrounding Colorado already offer in-state tuition to undocumented students, including conservative states like Kansas and Texas, and those policies have been enormously successful– not just at graduating students and seeing them apply for citizenship, but also at attracting many of Colorado’s best undocumented high school graduates.

ASSET in different forms has been introduced repeatedly in Colorado over the last half-decade and its sponsors have vowed to bring it back again next year.

“I’d rather see our graduates going to school than sitting in their boxers playing Nintendo in their parents’ basement,” said bill sponsor Sen. Mike Johnston at an early Education Committee hearing.

For now, however, the thousands of undocumented Colorado kids who have graduated and who are graduating from high schools across the state won’t be paying to attend Colorado’s universities, colleges and junior colleges, nor will they be up and relocating to the countries where they were born but mostly haven’t visited since arriving in the States as toddlers. Instead, they’ll be watching their longtime friends go off to school and they’ll go to school in other states or they’ll sit in their basements playing video games or they’ll do yard work for cheap or they’ll sell dope.

Gay rights

Civil unions, Senate Bill 002

The gay-rights bill dominated the legislative session and the special session that followed it. The bill would grant state rights and protections to gay couples and to their children, establishing overdue legal responsibilities, for example, in regard to child support and visitation. Supporters called this a “family values” bill and it garnered unanimous Democratic support as well as the support of high-profile Republicans working inside and outside the capitol. It also eventually won over a clear majority of lawmakers in both chambers of the legislature. Yet Republican House leaders used unprecedented procedural moves to make sure the bill never made it to the floor for debate. Christian-right-orchestrated opposition argued the bill went against Biblical teachings and that it sought to legalize “gay marriage” in the face of a state constitutional amendment put in place by voters in 2006 defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

House Speaker Frank McNulty, urged on by Majority Leader and former Focus on the Family staffer Amy Stephens, threw up road blocks during the last days of the session as the bill chugged along through three Republican-controlled House committees on its march toward the full chamber. On the second-to-last day of the session, the bill lurked behind all activity, shaping discussion and leading to thinly veiled lawmaker confrontations. Amid an often absurd evening filibuster, when Democrats and their Republican allies maneuvered to bring the bill to the floor, the McNulty bloc called a recess and the Speaker, at a loss, went out on a walkabout for more than two hours, running out the clock on debate.

In the special session called by Gov. John Hickenlooper to revive the civil unions debate and to pick up the remains of the dozens of bills dropped in the wake of the battle over civil unions, McNulty assigned the bill to a stacked committee of loyalists who killed the bill.

Colorado Republicans enjoyed a one-seat majority in the House this session. Democrats are hoping to win that seat this year and gain control of committee assignments in both chambers. To make that happen, Metro State Political Science Prof. Norm Provizer said civil unions supporters and activists, including Republican voters, will have to keep their eye on the ball.

“Will this switch things to the Democrats? I’m not sure it will make a gigantic difference,” he said. “It’s natural to want to support people– regardless of party– who support [civil unions]. What people have to remember, though, is that they are also voting to give a seat to a party and that it may be in their interest to support candidates [explicitly to flip the majority].”

The sponsor of the civil unions bill, openly gay Denver Democratic Sen. Pat Steadman, will no doubt introduce a new version same as the old version on the first day of the 2013 session.

Women’s health

With an eye on the intense anti-abortion bills passed by the Republican Congress and in Republican-controlled state capitols across the country– efforts that for example attempted to outlaw contraception, limit legal rape to vague “forcible” instances and mandate doctors read scientifically inaccurate material to abortion seekers and submit them to vaginal-probe ultrasounds– Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains President Vicki Cowart expressed relief that Colorado beat back such efforts.

“We expected 2012 to usher in harmful bills targeting Colorado women and families but, thankfully, our champions in the House and Senate as well as our advocates in the community did not sit idly by,” she said.

Personhood, House Bill 1130 and Senate Bill 125

The Democrat-controlled Senate killed both of this session’s anti-abortion bills, which aimed to classify human embryos as persons with legal rights. The arguments in support of these bills caused some head scratching, coming as they did from the same people making arguments against civil unions.

In opposing civil unions, Republicans argued that voting for the law would violate the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box in 2006′s Amendment 43 and Referendum I, which respectively banned gay marriage and rejected civil unions. Yet Colorado voters have twice in the last four years rejected so-called personhood initiatives– and by much wider margins than they rejected gay partnership rights.

Health insurance and religious freedom, Senate Memorial 003

The Senate also killed a proposal aimed at backing congressional legislation that would allow employers, citing any moral objection, to refuse to provide health benefits for employees. Supporters of the proposal argued that it bolstered religious freedom. Opponents argued that religious freedom is already safeguarded in the U.S. Constitution and that these kind of proposals set up a legal free for all, where employers would be able to object to any category of action– like having unmarried sex or meat eating — and are given free rein to discriminate against employees, or at least take advantage of them by finding a spurious way to cut costs, by denying them coverage.

Speaking on this year’s legislative session, Ellen Dumm, executive director of the progressive politics Campaign for a Strong Colorado, said that, as a matter of political strategy, Republican lawmakers seem to understand that they are out of step with constituents on matters like gay rights and the obligation of employers to provide full reproductive health care coverage, that they seem to know that they should pay less attention to social issues and more attention to economic issues. “Still, they just can’t do it,” she said.

[ Image of Colorado capitol by TCI ]

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To bring down the high chlamydia infections rate among Tennessee teenagers, an anti-abortion pregnancy center in Athens, Tenn., has proposed spending federal tax dollars on a life-sized version of the Game of Life.

The “Teen Life Maze” is just one of the ideas put forth by a cluster of crisis pregnancy centers that are receiving government grants to conduct abstinence education as part of President Obama’s health-care reform law.

Records obtained by The American Independent show that the government is paying for abstinence programs run by centers that promote dubious medical information. For example, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) receiving funding through the program claim that “reliable studies” have shown a link between abortion and breast cancer.

One of the centers says it seeks to help students understand “the lack of effectiveness of condoms/birth control in STD protection and pregnancy.”

TAI previously reported that a South Dakota anti-abortion CPC that requires its volunteers to be Christians received funding under a program created by Obama’s stimulus bill.

Between 1996 and 2009, taxpayers spent more than $1.5 billion on abstinence-only education, paid for by federal grants and state matching funds, according to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. In 2004, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) released a report that found that these programs often contained false or distorted information about sex and reproductive health, such as claiming that condoms have a high failure rate at preventing HIV and pregnancy, women who have abortions have a high risk of becoming sterile, and HIV can be transmitted through sweat and tears.

Shortly after taking office, Obama moved to cut off federal funding for most abstinence-only education.

However, during the intense negotiations over the health-care-reform bill in 2009 and 2010, Congress attached a $250 million grant program for abstinence-only instruction (granting up to $50 million annually, through 2014). Under the program, state health departments apply for abstinence funding and can then allocate sub-awards to various organizations across the state, including county health departments, schools, community groups, and faith-based nonprofits.

So far, at least three anti-abortion CPCs have received funding through this provision. They’re all in Tennessee, which has the nation’s 11th highest teen birth rate, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In January, the Tennessee Department of Health announced it was dividing $3.2 million in abstinence funding among 13 agencies through 2014 to “support comprehensive, evidence-based and medically accurate community-based education programs.”

A total of about $650,000 of that money was awarded to the three CPCs: Full Circle Women’s Services in Athens, Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center in Dyersburg, and Women’s Care Center of Rhea County, Inc., in Dayton. Per the terms of the grant program, each grant recipient has to match 75 percent of the award.

When they’re not teaching teens not to have sex, these centers are seeing women – sometimes teens – facing unplanned, and often unwelcomed, pregnancies. They seek to discourage abortion, offering women various services including counseling and free pregnancy tests. The websites of two of the centers – Full Circle Women’s Services and Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center – feature an array of misinformation about abortion, including claims that abortion causes breast cancer and depression.

Despite widespread rejection of an abortion-breast cancer link from major medical institutions such as the American Cancer Society, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the National Cancer Institute, these CPCs imply that there is a connection, claiming on their websites that “a number of reliable studies have demonstrated connection between abortion and later development of breast cancer.”

According to the American Cancer Society, “At this time, the scientific evidence does not support the notion that abortion of any kind raises the risk of breast cancer or any other type of cancer.”

Both Full Circle Women’s Services and the Women’s Care Center are affiliated with Care Net, a national network of crisis pregnancy centers that prohibits its members from recommending, offering, or referring “single women” for contraception

Whereas proponents of comprehensive sex education encourage teaching teens how to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy and diseases while acknowledging that condoms are not guaranteed to work 100 percent of the time, abstinence-education advocates often claim that teaching about proper condom use offers young people a “false sense of security.”

On their websites, Full Circle, Life Choices Pregnancy Resource Center, and the Women’s Care Center cite identical statistics emphasizing what they portray as the lack of effectiveness of condoms. These centers tell readers that “consistent” condom use during vaginal sex reduces the risk of “HIV by 85%”; human papillomavirus “by 50% or less”; and gonorrhea, Chlamydia, herpes, and syphilis “by about 50%.” The statistics come from various studies compiled by the Medical Institute, a nonprofit organization whose advice for preventing STDs is: “Avoid sexual activity if you are single. Be faithful to one uninfected partner for the rest of your life.”

Richard A. Crosby, a professor and chair at the Department of Health Behavior at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, told TAI that these statistics are misleading.

“These are not statistics that are widely supported by the literature,” Crosby said. “They are confounded by a lack of accounting for the correct use of condoms. Consistent use alone is not enough. … When you do not account for the correct use, you have an underestimate of the effectiveness.”

Crosby, who has received federal grants to research HIV prevention, is currently working on a “highly controlled, rigorous” study funded by the National Institutes of Health to determine the value of consistent and correct condom use in preventing three common STIs: Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and trichomoniasis.

“All of these numbers are way low,” Crosby said, referring to the pregnancy centers’ statistics (with the exception of the rate of condom-use effectiveness at preventing HPV, which he said is supported by studies). He said the claim that condoms are 85 percent effective in reducing HIV infection is “really misleading” and not supported by many research studies that isolate for consistent and correct use.

‘Innovative Approaches’

Full Circle Women’s Services – awarded $154,200 – is the anti-abortion pregnancy center that proposed trying to curb teen sex with a giant “Teen Life Maze.” The center cited the game as one of its “innovative approaches” to abstinence instruction in a grant application submitted to the Tennessee health department in May 2011. The maze is described as a “large game board of rooms designed to let teens experience the consequences – both positive and negative – of life choices. It is effective in that teens get to play along in seeing firsthand the results of good decisions and bad decisions ranging from making trips to the doctor for a lifelong STD or the satisfaction in staying on course and graduating from high school.”

In a subsequent document, the center explained that inspiration for the game comes from Georgia, where life mazes have been hosted in several schools across the state, and that Full Circle was “in the planning stages of bringing this event to Athens.”

Other innovative approaches proposed by Full Circle include hosting a game show about the risks of having sex and screening the film Look Before You Leap, described in the proposal as “an adrenaline rush of drama, action, and humor that takes relationship education to extreme heights.”

Full Circle, founded in 1998, has been offering privately financed abstinence-education services to mostly elementary and middle schools in McMinn County for a few years now. In its grant proposal, the center explained that the extra cash would be used to hire more educators. Currently, the center’s program, called On TRAC (Teaching Teens Responsibility and Consequences), relies on abstinence curriculum called “Think on Point” and “Life on Point,” created by On Point, a youth-development group in Chattanooga, Tenn

“Think on Point” is a five-day program offered once a year to sixth- through ninth-graders during physical education class. According to the program description, “[t]he curriculum includes homework assignments, in-class handouts, role-playing activities, and focused small-group discussion. … Lessons at every grade level discuss the topics of abstinence, sexually transmitted diseases, media influence, and standards and boundaries; other more specific themes include pregnancy, pornography, abuse, value and self-worth, and the essence of real love.”

“Life on Point” is designed to dig deeper into risky activities. The center also proposed bringing five-day abstinence instruction to older teens in high school life skills and health classes.

All of the abstinence-only programs funded under Tennessee’s Affordable Care Act grant had to submit short- and long-term program objectives. Full Circle Women’s long-term goals include curbing rates of teen pregnancy, school dropouts, and STDs in McMinn and Meigs counties, and also a “decrease in percentage of children being raised by single mothers below the poverty line.” Short-term goals include “increased knowledge of STDS and pregnancy risks” and “understanding the lack of effectiveness of condoms/birth control in STD protection and pregnancy.”

To make the case for giving Full Circle money to target 10- to 17-year-olds in McMinn, Meigs, and Polk counties (in southeastern part of the state), Full Circle’s grant application cited statistics showing STD rates among teens are high in the area, including “Tennessee Department of Health reports that the number of reported cases of Chlamydia in McMinn County has increased a staggering 1200% from 1994-2007.”

Full Circle Women’s Services Executive Director Anne Montgomery turned down TAI’s request for an interview.

In line with the eight-point federal guidelines of abstinence education, the other two CPCs receiving Affordable Care Act funding similarly offer plans to educate teens about the repercussions of sexual activity and advocate abstinence as the only means to avoid those repercussions.

Here is part of how the Women’s Care Center promotes its abstinence program, called The Edge:

While “until marriage” may sound like practically forever, let’s get a little perspective on this. The average age of initial marriage in the United States is 26 years old. That gets even lower in more rural areas. And the payoff of sexual abstinence is that you have the rest of your married life to enjoy your sexuality without having to suffer the consequences of emotional baggage, crotch-crippling STDs, or teen pregnancy. That sounds to me like a pretty good deal.

Among the desired outcomes of Life Choices Pregnancy Resource Center’s abstinence-until-marriage program, Right Choices of West Tennessee, are “increased knowledge regarding the effects of teen sexual behavior and sexually-transmitted diseases” and “increased commitment to abstinence until marriage.”

The directors of Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center and the Women’s Care Center did not return requests for interviews.

Earlier this month, the CDC released new data showing that America’s teen birthrate is the lowest it has been since 1946. The Guttmacher Institute, a proponent of comprehensive sex education, credited that drop, in part, with improvements in contraceptive use.

But Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, said high rates of STDs among teens means the abstinence-only message is still necessary.

“While teen birth rates have reached historic lows, STD rates among teens are at historic highs, so condom-centered education is certainly not sufficient to deal with even the physical consequences of sexual activity since 2 of the 4 most common STDs are easily transmissible with a condom,” Huber told TAI in an email. “Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) abstinence education makes sense from a public health perspective and also as an approach that both resonates with teens and protects them from any of the consequences of sexual activity, not the least of which is pregnancy.”

Bennet was seeking to rally support for the bill as it moves to the Republican-controlled House and to take measure of how the legislation translates for people working on campus and in the city of Boulder with victims and perpetrators of stalking, domestic violence and sexual assault.

“It’s nice to meet with people working on the ground, particularly when politics in Washington is as screwed up as it is right now,” Bennet told roughly 30 people gathered in a conference room hemmed in by the Flatiron mountains.

He referenced his time as the superintendent of the Denver Public School system. “There’s not much of a feedback loop [in Washington]. You watch laws get passed, but on the ground sometimes they don’t make a lot of sense. It can be a one-way game of telephone.”

Representatives from rape centers and legal assistance offices told Bennet that funds provided by the Act were critical in establishing resources. Barb Paradiso from the University of Colorado Denver said there was no office or staff to deal with the issue on her urban campus just three years ago. She said grant money awarded through the Act was crucial to getting services up and running and hiring employees.

“In just three years, we’ve come a long way. We have a foundation [on which] to build now,” she said.

Bennet said it was unfortunate that the Senate five year reauthorization would slash $150 million from the Act’s previous $800 million budget. That was a response to fiscal realities, he explained.

“I call Washington the land of flickering lights, because the standard these days is just to manage to keep things running.”

The people gathered at CU told Bennet that, although great strides have been made in providing help for victims, the culture surrounding the issue hasn’t changed in ways that would work to head off the violence and decrease the number of victims.

“We reach out to victims but we don’t reach out to perpetrators,” said Celeste Montoya, a political science professor and faculty adviser for the campus Gender Justice League. She said a lot could be done to intervene before any crime or harassment takes place. “We know where to begin,” she told the Colorado Independent, “the sports teams and the fraternities.

“We have a great policy on paper to support victims but to target prevention, funding for that would be tremendously appreciated.”

The Violence Against Women Act, originally sponsored by now-Vice President Joe Biden, was passed in 1994 and has been reauthorized consistently. It pays for programs that provide, for example, legal assistance and temporary housing for victims, enforcement of court-ordered protection services and youth prevention programs.

This year, however, reauthorization has been charged with election-year politics. Democrats added provisions that would extend services to same-sex and undocumented immigrant victims. Conservatives have argued that Democrats are, in effect, daring them to vote against reauthorization, looking to gain more material to fill out a portrait of the party as insensitive to women.

Bennet, secure in his seat for another four years, is nevertheless the poster boy for “war on women” election campaign strategies bubbling up across the country.

As a candidate in 2010, Bennet looked to win over women across Colorado by highlighting the hardline social conservative policy stances struck by his Republican opponent Ken Buck. Bennet, appointed to office two years earlier when Ken Salazar became Secretary of the Interior, was an underdog in the race. It was the first time he had ever run for office and it was the year Republican candidates notched victories in record numbers coast to coast.

Yet Buck, who as Weld County district attorney years before had declined to prosecute a rape case partly because he thought a skeptical jury would see the defendant as merely suffering a case of “buyer’s remorse,” was portrayed by critics as an unyielding relic of a past era. In the end, Bennet succeeded in winning the votes of women by a wide margin and did so in a contest where every vote mattered. He elbowed past Buck at the finish line, winning the election by something like 10,000 of roughly 800,000 votes cast.

[ Image of Senator Bennet at CU by The Colorado Independent ]

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State legislators, musicians, poets, community leaders, and ordinary Coloradans will speak about current legislation in Colorado and other states. Following the rally, attendees will march around the State Capitol and back around Civic Center Park to where they started.

Presenters at the Rally will include:

State Representative and US Congressional Candidate Joe Miklosi; State senators Morgan Carroll, Rev. Lucia Guzman, and Betty Boyd; State Senate Majority President and U.S. congressional candidate Brandon Shaffer; state representatives Crisanta Duran and Lois Court; attorney Beth Klein; musical comedy by The Raging Grannies; Unitarian Universalist Reverend Dr. NoriRost; Rosemary Harris Lytle, CO NAACP state president; poetry slam artists, Suzi Q and Jen Rinaldi; and music by The Foxfield Four.

State Senator Morgan Carroll speaking at the Capitol. (Kersgaard)

“Extremists in Congress are deliberately increasing the cost of health care for millions of women. At the same time, they have let the Violence Against Women Act expire. It is outrageous” said Miklosi.

As the New York Times first reported, the anti-poverty Catholic Campaign (CCHD) in February told Compañeros Executive Director Nicole Mosher that her group’s annual $30,000 grant was in jeopardy. Mosher told the Colorado Independent that a Catholic Campaign liaison in Pueblo explained the problem was that both Compañeros and gay-rights group One Colorado were affiliated with the wider Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. The coalition, which includes well more than 50 member organizations, has openly supported the rights of gay immigrants and has joined with One Colorado in championing the same-sex civil unions bill making its way through the Colorado legislature.

As the Colorado Independent recently reported, no one from the Catholic Campaign ever asked Compañeros about its stand on gay rights or about its ties to One Colorado. Mosher said the Campaign’s concerns seemed based on sources far removed from the reality of the work being done on the ground by her organization, which mostly concerns education on U.S. laws and shepherding immigrants and their families through courts, hospitals, schools and tax filings.

For Church watchers, the events in Colorado seemed to spotlight the way power is being wielded within the Church by non-clerical Catholic groups armed with internet connections and formed to champion hard-line positions on social issues such as abortion and gay rights.

An evangelical Catholicism

James Salt, executive director of liberal Catholic group Catholics United, told the Independent that the hunt for “100 percent orthodoxy,” as he put it, is altering the Church in the United States.

“There was once the feeling that our faith could move mountains and especially on behalf of the most-marginalized members of society,” he said. “But [Church leaders] have been pushed farther and farther rightward by these well-organized groups with narrow agendas.”

Salt said that the battle over the Catholic Campaign is an outgrowth of the rise of the Christian right in U.S. politics in the 1980s.

“The [Catholic] bishops were once seen as a prophetic voice on behalf of the poor. Now they’re known primarily as a voice on wedge issues. That all seems counter cultural to Catholics, more evangelical, more partisan, more politically motivated than spiritually motivated.”

The Catholic Campaign, founded in the 1960s with a progressive Vatican II-era mission to fight for social justice by attacking root causes of poverty, has been a ripe target for pressure. Conservative critics have accused its leaders of “working in direct contradiction to Church teaching” by awarding grants to organizations that “directly or through coalition membership have promoted abortion, birth control, homosexuality and/or Marxism,” according to a watchdog report brought out last fall by a coalition called Reform CCHD Now.

The Reform CCHD Now coalition was formed in 2009 and is led by Virginia-based anti-abortion groups American Life League and Human Life International, which registered the coalition’s internet domain name.

The coalition also includes smaller groups, such as Colorado Catholics for Personhood, a local chapter of the national movement to challenge Roe v Wade by passing laws around the country that would grant fertilized human eggs full legal rights.

The group is run by Gualberto Garcia Jones, who is also spokesman for the Personhood Colorado ballot initiative campaigns run this year and in 2010.

It’s unclear what role a group like Colorado Catholics for Personhood plays in the mission of Reform CCHD Now. Jones was traveling last week and unavailable to comment for this story.

Affiliation transgressions

Human Life International, founded in 1981, reports a presence in 100 countries around the world. Its activities include lobbying to outlaw abortion in the U.S. and abroad, organizing conferences and trainings and holding sidewalk counseling sessions outside abortion centers.

The main work of the coalition, however, seems to be carried out by the American Life League. The League was founded in 1979 and calls itself the “largest grassroots Catholic pro-life education organization” in the country. In the fall of 2010 and 2011, just before annual fundraising efforts launched for the Catholic Campaign, the League released watchdog reports on the Campaign’s grants. The 2011 report recommended the Campaign pull funding for roughly 54 of its 218 grantees. Compañeros was not included on that list.

Michael Hichborn, spokesman for both the American Life League and the Reform CCHD Now coalition, told the Independent that his groups had “nothing to do with the charges against Compañeros” and that it was “the local [Pueblo] diocese which made its own discoveries and drew its own conclusions” in the matter.

Yet, the American Life League’s watchdogging is clearly having an effect. As is the case with Compañeros, more than 40 of the organizations listed for defunding in the League’s 2011 report were targeted based on associations they maintain with larger coalitions.

Many of the groups made the list, for example, due to ties to the Center for Community Change, which the report authors explain “signed an open letter to President Obama and some members of Congress urging them to continue funding Planned Parenthood, is actively involved in the promotion of homosexuality and equates abortion rights with criminal justice.”

Critics told the Independent that the American Life League research lacks vital perspective and that it trades on guilt by association.

In the eyes of anti-abortion groups, for example, Planned Parenthood is recognized first and foremost as the largest abortion provider in the nation, but for anti-poverty groups, Planned Parenthood is seen primarily as the largest provider of vital health care to poor women coast to coast.

And, in the case of groups tied to the Center for Community Change, it’s unclear what’s more objectionable, a grantee’s association with the Center, or the Center’s association with Planned Parenthood, which in all of the cases listed in the American Life League report, is an association two steps removed from any grantee and one based on a single letter of support.

Salt characterized the American Life League’s research on the Catholic Campaign a lamentable product of the digital age.

“These far right groups can find any minuscule hint of a supposed transgression and use it as a point of attack,” he said.

Mosher said that, in the case of Compañeros, there would be no way to know from an internet search how thin are its ties to One Colorado, how remote are the workings of the organizations in day-to-day operations and how impractical it would be for Compañeros to try to control the membership of either the state’s immigrant rights coalition or of any other such coalition to which it might belong.

Hichborn, however, said that, in the matter of Compañeros, any talk about One Colorado and the role of Reform CCHD Now is a distraction.

In an email he wrote that, based on research he has conducted since the story broke, the problem likely was never One Colorado, it was that Companeros is a “founding member of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which is itself actively promoting same-sex marriage, attending gay-pride parades, and promoting homosexuality in general; all of which is in direct conflict with immutable Catholic moral teaching.

“Companeros is so intimately linked with [the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition] that official actions taken by [the coalition] reflect extended actions by Companeros as well. By joining [the coalition] as a “member,” Companeros is participating in its actions.”

‘Open source analysis’

The likelihood that it was the Catholic Campaign which found fault with the Compañeros membership in the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition must be seen as progress for the reform movement.

Hounded by criticism, the Campaign underwent an intense “review and renewal” process in 2010 that ended in its adopting the language of its critics. The Ten Commitments reform program (pdf) that came out of the process aimed at developing “more specific ethical guidance to help the Bishops carry out [the Campaign’s] policy of prohibiting funding to groups which are part of coalitions that act in conflict with fundamental Catholic moral and social teaching.”

What’s more, Hichborn and the Reform coalition members make no apologies for their research methods. Indeed, defending them has been a large part of the coalition’s activities almost from its inception.

Two years ago the coalition launched attacks on John Carr, who oversees the Catholic Campaign as executive director of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development. Citing Carr’s work over the course of years for the Center for Community Change, the coalition alleged that the Conference of Catholic Bishops was engaged in a “systematic pattern of cooperation with evil.”

Carr told the sympathetic Catholic News Service that he stood by the work of the Center to address poverty and that he had no knowledge of any of its alleged “work to promote abortion and homosexuality.” He said that no one from the Reform coalition had contacted him before making the allegations.

Bishops rallied around Carr and denounced the accusations as internet smears.

“You can have one person with a website call you a left-wing radical, and [your] family is asking… ‘What’s going on?’” said Bishop Roger Morrin from Mississippi.

The coalition responded by explaining that it uses an “open source analysis” methodology “promulgated by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” In effect, that means the coalition researchers lean on internet searches but that they look for primary source documents authored by the organizations in question– public relations releases and letters, for example, like the one sent by the Center for Community Change to Washington lawmakers in support of Planned Parenthood.

At the American Life League website, Hichborn defended the criticism of Carr and the Catholic Campaign. He argued that the associations unearthed by coalition researchers, however loose, demonstrate the way the Campaign is compromising the integrity of the Church and its mission.

“As I have repeated since we began our investigation, [Campaign] staff and leadership are either incompetent or they are complicit. Whatever the case may be, there can be no doubt that the [Catholic Campaign] has completely failed its mission by sleeping with the enemy.”

That’s exactly the kind of harsh rhetoric Salt called “tone deaf” within a Catholic culture that reveres the mission taken on by men like Carr and the bishops guiding the Catholic Campaign.

Salt cited recent Pew Research Center data that suggests one third of Americans who were raised Catholic have left the Church. In fact, he believes the rising power of groups like Reform CCHD Now is both a cause and a result of the fact that Catholics raised with the Vatican II ideals are leaving the Church in droves.

“In the 1980s, you had these conservative commentators like George Weigel saying they wanted to turn the Church 180 degrees away from social justice. Well, they’re succeeding by using these divisive tactics, and it just drives people from the Church.”

[ Image: Reconstruction of the nave of the Domkerk in Utrecht via Paulus 2 at Wiki Commons. ]

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Pic by Ceridwn, via Wikimedia Commons

Catholic Bishops, one of the biggest opponents of the federal government’s decision to require health insurance companies to cover birth control as a preventive service, released a proclamation this week “calling for every priest, parish and layperson to participate in ‘great national campaign’ to defend religious liberty, which they said is ‘under attack, both at home and abroad,’” The New York Times reports.

“Religious freedom” has been the rallying cry among Catholic leaders who oppose the Obama administration’s decision. Despite an expressed exception for “religious institutions that offer insurance to their employees,” Catholic Bishops, Catholic hospitals, Catholic physicians and other Catholic groups have publicly expressed opposition to the exception because “it is too limited.” More recently, the feds even extended that exemption to religious organizations — including faith-based hospitals. These groups would not have to cover birth control themselves, but would just have to provide a way for women who want coverage to receive it.

However, a small group of religious leaders has continued to claim the government’s decision, which was recommended by the Institute of Medicine, is an attack on the religious freedoms of Catholics and others.

The Times reports that the Bishops are now hoping to get priests and lay members from all over the country to also admonish the decision:

In particular they urged every diocese to hold a “Fortnight for Freedom” during the two weeks leading up to the Fourth of July, for parishioners to study, pray and take public action to fight what they see as the government’s attempts to curtail religious freedom.

“To be Catholic and American should mean not having to choose one over the other,” said the statement, issued by the bishops ad hoc committee on religious freedom.

…

In the document, the bishop seek to explain that their alarm is not only about the mandate in the health reform act that requires even Catholic colleges and hospitals to have insurance plans that cover birth control. They cite seven examples of what they say are violations of religious freedom, including immigration laws in several states that they say make it illegal to minister to illegal immigrants.

They also assert that the government has violated the religious freedom of Catholics by cutting off contracts to Catholic agencies. Several states have denied financing to Catholic agencies that refused to place foster children with gay parents. And the federal government refused to reauthorize a grant to a Catholic immigration organization that served victims of sex trafficking because as a Catholic group, it would not provide or refer women to services for abortion and birth control.

Last month, a judge ruled in favor of the Obama administration in a legal challenge filed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over that group’s loss of federal funding to fight sex trafficking. Federal officials explained they were not awarded the funds because they refuse to refer victims for contraceptives or abortion services, which they deem important for victims of sexual exploitation.

In the proclamation letter to Catholic priests around the country, the Bishops claimed that the laws were “unjust” and should either be either changed or fought, the Times reports.

Despite ongoing resistance from some religious groups, federal health officials have stood by and defended the decision.

The decision has wide public support, as well. Polls have found that 66 percent of Americans agree with the federal government’s decision to include birth control in its list of preventative services and a recent poll found that almost 70 percent of women believe the decision is a “matter of women’s health, not religious freedom.”

The controversial initiative taps into the increasingly heated tug of war over social issues waging between Christian organizations and representatives of the government, most recently, for example, on the question of whether employers should be required to provide insurance coverage for contraception.

As submitted, the title of the initiative contains one sentence. It proposes to add “an amendment to the Colorado Constitution expressing the public policy of the state of  Colorado that government may not burden a person’s or religious organization’s freedom of religion (pdf).”

An initiative title is the language that appears on ballots for voters to read. It describes the intent of the initiative and is required to be written in as straightforward a manner as possible.

According to sources at the hearing, the board yesterday made only small, non-substantive changes to the religious freedom title language before approving it.

Initiative proponent Tom Minnery, executive director of CitizenLink, Focus on the Family’s political arm, was not immediately available for comment.

Initiative opponents, however, told the Colorado Independent that the initiative language is deceptive, that it would not so much protect religious freedom as blow open exemptions in state and federal law, effectively setting up a separate legal standard for any person or group claiming to be motivated in their actions by faith.

The opposition is being led by a coalition of groups that include gay-rights organization One Colorado, the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, among others. Coalition representatives told the Independent they are determined to challenge the title as too vague and legally fraught, either by appealing to the title board, challenging the title in court, or both.

“We’re prepared to go to the [state] Supreme Court,” said One Colorado Executive Director Brad Clark. “The measure is not only vague, it’s also unnecessary. Protections for religious freedom are already written into the  state and U.S. constitutions. We think [the initiative] is redundant, which raises questions about the true intent here. We think there should be a lot more public discussion about this proposal.”

Supporters of the initiative have made the case for it in the past by citing the fact that displays of faith in the public sphere have come under fire. They point to the case in Littleton, Colorado, for example, where legal wrangling bogged down efforts to erect Christian memorials at Columbine, the public high school where 13 people died in the tragic shootings of 1999.

Clark and others, however, say Columbine, although a powerful point of reference, is perhaps less relevant than more recent battles over contraception, abortion and gay equality. Those battles, they say, provide context vital to understanding what’s at stake.

“We’re concerned about the civil rights implications,” Jeremy Shaver, executive director of the Colorado Interfaith Alliance, told the Independent. “We think the way the initiative is written could provide legal cover for discrimination.”

Shaver said employers might lean on the amendment to refuse to hire divorced women. Landlords could avoid renting to unmarried couples. Doctors or pharmacists could decline to treat or serve gay patients and customers.

Cardozo School of Law Professor Marci Hamilton, who specializes in constitutional state and religion questions, has argued for years against what she calls the new wave of “extreme state religious freedom… legislation.” She says initiatives like the one Focus on the Family is proposing for Colorado would lift important legal protections that guard the public against potentially harmful actions motivated by religious belief.

Hamilton has said that women seeking abortions and gay people seeking housing or employment are examples that come immediately to mind, but that children are perhaps the most vulnerable population in these matters. In testifying against similar proposals elsewhere (e.g.: pdf), Hamilton has pointed out that children have been forced by adult minders of various faiths to go without inoculations or to depend on prayer alone to cure illness, for example, and that they have also been subjected on a vast scale to physical and sexual abuse that can be covered over with reference to religious belief or ritual.

Hamilton says the legal history tied to the struck-down federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and the subsequent state versions that cropped up in its wake documents a struggle to balance legal priorities and to shift burdens to protect or to not infringe upon constitutional rights.

“The very name of the Religious Freedom Restoration acts connote America and apple pie,” she wrote in a 2010 essay. “Who could disagree with a law in favor of restoring religious freedom, which is our constitutional right?

“Yet, providing such a low threshold for a religious group or individual to avoid… accountability virtually guarantees that such groups will be able to hide behind high legal barriers.”

In addition to mounting a challenge to the initiative title, One Colorado has already submitted a sort of companion initiative to the state that seeks to clarify laws governing “actions related to religious belief” by tying them more specifically to the private sphere (pdf).

Clark called the One Colorado initiative “definitional” and described it as “just another avenue” to expand public safety and equality safeguards.

For politics and religion watchers in Colorado, the battle this year over the initiative recalls a battle fought in 2010, when Focus on the Family, acting with the Catholic Church, submitted a first-round version of its religious freedom proposal. That version drew similarly strong opposition and the proponents pulled it in the face of an impending Supreme Court challenge.

One of the initiative proponents in 2010 was Jenny Kraska, director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, the political wing for the Church’s three dioceses in the state. Representatives of the Catholic Church have not signed on as proponents of this year’s version nor yet declared public support for it, although the Church is supporting similar efforts around the country, including in North Dakota and Kansas.

Messages left with the Colorado Catholic Conference were not immediately returned.

[ Image of Focus on the Family headquarters, a travel blog photo via TravelPod page: The Best of Colorado Springs ]

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The meeting came on the Wednesday of midterm week just days before spring break, so officials said they were encouraged but not surprised by the fact that roughly 150 students turned out. They told the Colorado Independent that young people seemed at least as energized in their support for Obama this year as they were in 2008, when members of the 18-to-29-year-old demographic voted for Obama over Republican rival John McCain by a record-setting two-thirds majority.

“Young voters. They’re the X-factor,” said a Colorado campaign official, shaking his head, raising his eyebrows and leaving his mouth open in a way that meant obviously!

A national staffer told the Independent that the reelection campaign, free from the need to wage a Democratic Party primary fight this year, is seizing on the advantage of time to ramp up outreach to young people and to enlist them early and in greater numbers to take on the kind of vital voter-contact and registration efforts young Obama supporters excelled at in 2008.

Indeed, the Obama event in Boulder was already the ninth of the “Greater Together Student Summits” the campaign has hosted at swing-state campuses since February, part of a campaign initiative launched last October. The summits lean heavily on promotion through online networks and usually feature celebrities in addition to senior campaign staffers and local Obama campaign volunteers.

Although pitched as an interactive discussion of key policy issues, the meeting in Boulder had the feel of a traditional campaign rally mashed up with a corporate motivational seminar.

Staffers, dressed in neat casual attire, sat on high stools and passed a microphone back and forth before an enormous screen bearing Power Point-style slides, tweeted questions from the audience and, to wrap the event, the 17-minute campaign video called “The Road We’ve Traveled” made by Davis Guggenheim, the producer and director behind blockbuster documentaries such as “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for Superman” and “It Might Get Loud.”

The narrative arc of the film appears to have set the pattern for the campaign’s summit presentations.

It begins by listing the crises that met the Obama administration on inauguration day in 2009 and then underlines the series of decisions made by the president to address them. A somber soundtrack thrums as references to disasters from 2009 roll across the screen: the mortgage debacle, the frozen financial markets, the failing Wall Street firms, the skyrocketing national debt, the impending auto-industry collapse and the avalanche of job loss.

Obama Adviser David Axelrod stares into the camera with weary eyes and drooping mustache and describes his state of mind during a post-election briefing on the economy.

“All I was thinking at that moment was Can we get a recount?”

Students at the summit responded to the film’s opening catalog of horrors with a mix of groans and ironic or exasperated laughs.

Obama for America Policy Director James Kvaal argued that young people should not view the 2012 election as a mere retread of 2008. It’s no less pressing, he said, even if it may seem less historic. He highlighted initiatives taken by the administration over the last four years of particular interest to young people: health care reform, middle class tax breaks and expansions in gay rights, tuition assistance and the renewable energy sector.

“This reelection is different from other reelections,” he said. “We’ve done a lot… but the important thing to remember is that we’re not done. If you compare it to the Bush reelection campaign of 2004, for example, at that point, President Bush had essentially carried out what he had set out to do. We were already engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and he had cut taxes for the wealthy twice. He didn’t do that much in his second term.

“All of the Republican candidates for president have vowed to roll back the progress we’ve made. There truly is a tremendous amount at stake… There is much left to do.”

Several speakers touched on a theme sure to be repeated often before November when they argued that all of the Republican candidates for president were vowing to repeal or defund laws and programs they disliked but that they offered no alternative plans to take the place of those laws and programs.

“Mitt Romney wants to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act,” said OFA National Operation Vote Director Buffy Wicks. “There are 2.5 million Americans in their twenties who now have access to health insurance through their parents’ plans. That includes 44,000 young Coloradans. Romney is running to take away health insurance from 44,000 Coloradans. What is he offering in exchange?”

“Think of the time and energy Republicans have dedicated to getting rid of Planned Parenthood,” she said later in response to a question on where the candidates stand on women’s issues. “This is something that provides the sharpest contrast– the low-cost preventive care, STD screening, well-women visits [provided by Planned Parenthood]… Again, what are the Republicans offering in exchange?”

Summit attendees interviewed by the Colorado Independent after the event rated it mostly successful.

“It could have been more interactive, less of a lecture format and more focused on action. Practical stuff. What do we do now? What are the next steps?” said Rhiannon Riccillo, a CU senior from Pueblo, who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008.

“The message was motivating, though… I guess it’s time to get started again. Since 2010, you can really see the Republican agenda. I mean, close Planned Parenthood? End contraception?”

As the Colorado Independent has recently reported, youth-vote analysts have been parsing statistics from the last two presidential elections and watching turnout so far for this year’s Republican primary, and they are concluding that the GOP seems effectively to be writing off the youth vote.

“Are the [Republican] candidates making an effort to get young people to participate? Are they speaking to youth? I see very little of it,” Abby Kiesa, youth coordinator and researcher at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, told the Colorado Independent.

The Obama campaign is clearly keyed in to the ground game mechanics that researchers at the Pew Foundation and scholars like University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket have explored in depth since 2008. Young people didn’t just vote for Obama, according to the researchers, they were also unusually active in his campaign. Nearly 30 percent of young Obama voters said they attended at least one campaign event that year. Those mobilized supporters mobilized more supporters.

In Colorado and the other battleground states, Pew found that young people were contacted in much greater numbers by the Obama campaign than were contacted by the McCain campaign. Battleground youth voters were also more likely to be contacted than were older battleground voters, which Pew reported was a “significant reversal from past patterns.”

In a few key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, Florida and Indiana, the percentage of young voters contacted by the Obama campaign reached up to 50 percent and 60 percent, doubling and tripling McCain campaign efforts and notching some of Obama’s biggest and/or most significant point spreads on Election Night.

The Obama campaign’s “Greater Together” effort is being launched with the guidance of top staffers and it has been underway for months. It has also carved out a major presence at the reelection website.

The campaign for GOP frontrunner Romney by contrast seems to have no staffers dedicated to the youth vote. There is no youth-voter section listed at the campaign website. And the campaign message for young people, according to Kiesa, is centered almost entirely on paying down the national debt.

Messages left with the Romney campaign were not immediately returned.

[ Image: Screen shot from "The Road We've Traveled" ]

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Personhood USA co-founder Keith Mason (Pic via personhoodusa.com)

State lawmakers in Oklahoma this week took up a piece of legislation that would grant “personhood” status to human embryos. The measure, which was passed by the state Senate, advanced through the House Public Health Committee, despite warnings that it could endanger the lives of women.

Oklahoma Senate Bill 1443 would require that the laws of the state be interpreted and construed “to acknowledge on behalf of the unborn child at every stage of development all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”

Though personhood supporters say their aim is to outlaw abortion, critics warn that fetal personhood measures would have a host of unintended consequences and could outlaw birth control, in vitro fertilization and some types of medical research.

An amendment brought by state Rep. Jeannie McDaniel, D-Tulsa, which read, “Nothing in this act would prevent a doctor from terminating a pregnancy to save the life of the mother,” was tabled during yesterday’s committee.

The bill’s House sponsor, state Rep. Lisa Billy, told the committee her bill is simply a “statement of purpose” that recognizes what she said is “the irrefutable scientific fact that life begins at conception.”

At least 22 states–including Colorado–are currently pushing personhood measures.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo (Pic by Nieve44/La Luz, via Flickr)

This past Friday, a judge ruled in favor of the Obama administration in a legal challenge filed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops over the religious group’s loss of federal funding.

Late last year, the Bishops lost millions of federal dollars for their relief program for victims of human trafficking. They lost the funds because they refused to refer victims for contraceptives or abortion. Three other groups were awarded the grants instead. Following the loss, the group filed legal action.

Mother Jones reports today, however, that the Obama administration did not “impose its views on contraception and abortion through its control of taxpayer dollars,” which is what the Bishops were alleging in their complaint.

According to Jones:

On Friday, a federal judge in Massachusetts essentially validated the Obama administration’s position, ruling in favor of the ACLU in the lawsuit over the contract. Even though the bishops no longer have the contract, they had joined with the ACLU in asking the judge to rule in the case to settle the constitutional issues. US District Judge Richard Stearns explained why the bishops were in the wrong. He wrote:

To insist that the government respect the separation of church and state is not to discriminate against religion; indeed, it promotes a respect for religion by refusing to single out any creed for official favor at the expense of all others….This case is about the limits of the government’s ability to delegate to a religious institution the right to use taxpayer money to impose its beliefs on others (who may or may not share them).

Stearns also cited an earlier Supreme Court ruling that found that the Framers “did not set up a system of government in which important, discretionary governmental powers would be delegated to or shared with religious institutions.” The judge’s ruling is potentially a big one: It calls into question the entire basis of the federal faith-based contracting initiative, implemented by George W. Bush, which gave tremendous power to groups like USCCB over taxpayer dollars. Stearns found, in fact, that it was USCCB that was making the decisions about how the federal anti-trafficking law should be administered—a job that properly rests with the government, not the church.

For years, Catholic groups have asked to be exempt from federal mandates that non-religious groups have to follow, particularly when it comes to birth control and abortion services. They are only asked to these follow mandates when they receive taxpayer funding. Throughout most of this time, powerful groups such as the Conference of Bishops have won their fights for exclusion — but lately the feds are reconsidering some programs.

The bishops have become well known for using their political power to roll back important protections and legal rights, mostly in the realm of reproductive rights. The Bishops have been described as a “group of men with no real background in law or medicine, but blessed with a strong personal interest in women’s bodies [who] have quietly influenced all of the major anti-abortion legislation over the past several years. “