DENVER– Seizing momentum on an upbeat first day of the 2012 session of the state legislature, House Minority Leader Mark Ferrandino, Democrat from Denver, encouraged members to cast aside gloomy predictions of election-year partisan gridlock and work together to pass bills to bolster the Colorado economy and create jobs for citizens across the state.
According to a poll conducted last week by Public Policy Polling, Colorado voters narrowly favor making same-sex marriage legal and favor legalizing civil unions by a more than 3-1 margin.
Colorado House Democrats unanimously elected Denver Rep Mark Ferrandino minority leader today. In just over two terms as a lawmaker, Ferrandino has made a name for himself as an open and dynamic figure committed to the legislative process and talented at steering substantive bills through partisan minefields toward passage. He is the second out gay member of the Colorado legislature to head the Democrats in the chamber in the last decade.
Former Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput took the reins in sex-scandal-plagued Philadelphia last week. A sampling of YouTubes posted last week offers a snapshot of his trying first days there, a new Church leader in a place grown deeply distrustful of Church leaders.
Survey results released by Public Policy Polling this week underline broad support in Colorado for some form of legislation that would grant gay couples equal partnership rights. Although Republican members of the House Judicial Committee last year quashed a popular civil unions bill, PPP found that even among Colorado Republican voters, support for civil unions-style legislation is now nearing 60 percent.
John Hickenlooper is an officeholder and a politician and yet he is well liked among the public. According to a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling last weekend, Colorado’s Democratic governor garners a 54 percent approval rating and only a 24 percent disapproval rating, a remarkable 30 point spread. Democrats love him, independents love him and Republicans think he’s OK. In other words, Hickenlooper is an odd fish, the Greenback Cutthroat Trout of 2011 U.S. politics, a compellingly strange-looking and endangered species.
State establishment political progressives, including the staff at gay rights group OneColorado, seem cool on Aurora college student Mark Olmstead’s plan to introduce a 2012 ballot initiative that would overturn the state’s gay marriage ban. There’s a sense that financial and human resources would be better spent pressing lawmakers to pass legislation securing equal rights for LGBT citizens here. Lone actor Olmstead’s initiative, however, might force the issue, drawing on the energy of New York’s big gay-marriage win this month and on the sea change shift among the U.S. population generally on the matter of gay equality.
Lambda Legal, a New York-based organization committed to winning gay civil rights through the courts, announced in a press release Tuesday that it would challenge New Jersey’s 2006 same sex civil unions law for failing to bring full equality to gay residents of the state. Lambda, which is teaming with New Jersey LGBT group Garden State Equality, will refer to government studies and press investigations that document the way employers have failed to recognize couples entered into a civil union and how civil unions have been ignored or misunderstood by authorities, often in instances involving critical medical decisions.
This past spring, debate in Colorado over a same-sex civil unions bill raised questions about citizen equality, child and family protections, religious freedom and anti-gay bigotry. News coming out of Illinois, where a civil unions bill that passed in the fall is now taking effect, resurfaces those same issues. Catholic Charities of Rockford, a city just northwest of Chicago, announced it would no longer provide its state-funded foster care and adoption services. Organization representatives said they would not place children with unmarried couples and that the law now exposed them to litigation for that stand.
Colorado hosted an intense proxy gay marriage debate around a same-sex civil unions bill during the state legislative session that ended two weeks ago. The bill was narrowly defeated pretty much along party lines. All Democrats voted for it, joined by a few Republicans. That’s roughly what happened in recent weeks in Minnesota, where lawmakers voted to include a referendum on voter ballots in the next election that would add a ban on gay marriage to the state constitution. Much of the Minnesota clash has been captured on YouTube. It echoes the debate last month in Colorado and foreshadows the debate sure to rise again here next year, when sponsors of the civil unions bill have vowed to bring it back.
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