Almost a year ago, Erika Highstead and Sarah Musick rented a party space, dressed in their finest and vowed their commitment to each other in front of a hundred friends.
DENVER— Lawmakers considering a bill that would end capital punishment in Colorado heard 10 hours of emotional testimony here Tuesday, including statements by a former state prisons chief and a former district court judge. The men said the death penalty…
Colorado state Representative B.J. Nikkel, R-Loveland, this weekend said the experience of bigotry and intimidation she experienced last spring during the debate over a same-sex civil unions bill has strengthened her position in support of the bill. She said that, even though she’s not running for reelection and won’t be at the capitol to vote, she’s confident that conservatives will come to see the bill as consistent with their social values and that next year’s version of the bill will pass with significant Republican backing.
The campaign mailer features two men leaning together and kissing. The image comes from a treasured engagement photo snapped in New York city that was allegedly stolen and reworked by an anti-gay Virginia group. The group, the Public Advocate of the United States, dimmed the original crisp black and white shot, replaced Manhattan skyscrapers and the Brooklyn Bridge with hazy snow-covered mountains and cut across the middle of the image with words on a blood-red line intended to mock the couple and attack Republican Colorado Senator Jean White, from Hayden in the rural conservative northwest top of the state.
“Jared Polis is a far left-wing candidate but Kevin Lundberg is even farther out on the right,” said Brett Moore, campaign manager for Boulder businessman Eric Weissmann, who lost in a neck-and-neck Republican primary last night to Christian-right state Senator Kevin Lundberg.
Results of a recent survey (pdf) bolster evidence that Coloradans by a wide majority support same-sex civil unions. The news comes in the wake of a standoff at the statehouse last month in which House Republicans killed a bill that would have established civil unions here. The pollster, Raleigh-based Public Policy Polling, tied the data on civil unions to the fact that the Republican Party in Colorado seems to be steadily losing support.
DENVER– Opposition to a gay-rights civil union bill defeated here last month was directed in large part by Colorado Springs-based evangelical empire Focus on the Family and the Colorado Catholic Conference. The Christian-right campaign, however, also reenergized a leading anti-gay rights activist organization of the 1990s, influential rough-and-tumble group Colorado for Family Values.
DENVER — Colorado’s 2012 Legislature may not have achieved greatness. It may not have risen above partisan divide to solve complex problems and unify a state. It may not have addressed the state’s economic malaise or found a way to reliably fund education for the long term.
Colorado legislative debate this year on education, gay rights and women’s health policies reflected larger well-worn national political back-and-forths, where showy speeches on immigration “illegals,” “traditional marriage” and religious freedom often sidetrack efforts to serve the public good.
The bill was never really debated in the Senate where it was introduced, then it was tacked on to a House bill amid the blizzard of activity that marked the last days of the Colorado legislative session. Government watchdog and elections groups on the right and left are now asking Gov. John Hickenlooper to veto it, arguing the bill would deny citizens the right to inspect voter ballots and “gut” the state’s Open Records Act.
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