Seven years ago the new head of the National Organization for Marriage, John Eastman, testified at a House impeachment hearing in Denver called by then-first-term-Rep. Greg Brophy. The staunch social conservative lawmaker from Wray drew national attention when he targeted Denver Judge John Coughlin as an “activist judge” who took it upon himself to make pro-gay laws from the bench.

Greg Brophy

Eastman, a California professor who had earlier filed a brief with the US Supreme Court arguing that Boy Scouts could exclude gay troop leaders, was one of two legal experts Brophy brought in to testify against Coughlin. The other expert, Steven Fitschen, came from Christian-right evangelist Pat Robertson’s National Legal Foundation in Virginia.

As journalists covering the hearing pointed out, although Coughlin was ostensibly being placed under the House spotlight for judicial overreaching, the real issue was gay rights.

“Coughlin has been on the bench nearly 25 years. He’s been re-elected to the bench by voters. He’s been given high marks by a state judicial review commission,” the Denver Post reported. “At the hearing, three private lawyers – including a former Republican state representative – testified to his competence. So did an ex-chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, two other former judges and  a prosecutor. [But] Brophy says Coughlin must be impeached for malfeasance for a single decision that tried to keep a little girl from being taught to hate a woman who helped raise her.”

The hearing stemmed from Coughlin’s decision in a custody dispute between a lesbian couple. One of the women, Cheryl Clark, adopted a child and shared parental rights with her partner, Elsey McLeod, but then Clark converted to Christianity, renounced homosexuality, and sought to deny parental rights to McLeod. Even though gay couples could not marry then as now in Colorado and so McLeod technically had no rights, Coughlin granted joint custody to the moms and ruled that the child should be guarded against homophobic church teachings.

Eastman argued the matter was “a pure question of law” and that McLeod was entitled to nothing in the dispute because she had no legal standing as a parent in Colorado. According to reports, he added that “giving McLeod any consideration in the case would be a violation of Clark’s religious freedom.” He warned the committee in passing that, in Canada, “there’s a  move afoot to define reading of the Bible as a hate crime because  it is anti-homosexual.”

Republicans Gov. Bill Owens and Senate President John Andrews opposed Brophy’s resolution. In the end, it was voted down eight to three. Brophy said he was trying to send a message to judges around the country and that he thought he had succeeded. Committee chairwoman Rep. Lynn Hefley, R-Colorado Springs, however, said Brophy and his two witnesses had failed to persuade.

“I think, quite frankly, that [Coughlin] acted with compassion,” she said. “I don’t see this rising to the level of impeachment.”

That was then. The momentum has been mostly swinging in favor of “compassion” in the years since, in the public square and in legislatures and courts across the land.

Brian Brown, president of NOM, on Thursday signaled at the shifting terrain of the gay-rights debate when he explained his group would be replacing passionate antigay activist and NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher with law professor Eastman. Brown touted Eastman’s legal credentials.

“[Eastman] is one of America’s foremost constitutional scholars and has distinguished himself as a fierce advocate for families and religious liberty. As a legal scholar, he has participated in dozens of cases before our nation’s highest courts, including the United States Supreme Court. When important constitutional principles are on the line, people frequently turn to John Eastman to advocate a conservative, pro-family position.”

[ Top image: John Eastman ]

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Redistricting happens every 10 years. It’s the law. It’s never pretty and it’s seldom fair, but it always gets done. Last time, it took until 2007 before the U.S. Supreme Court finally said enough is enough.

Will Colorado go down that road again this year? No one knows. Democrats and Republicans will either compromise or they can carry their briefcases from the Capitol to the Court House. It is up to them.

“The congressional redistricting fight won’t end when Gov. Bill Owens signs the bill that the House will presumably send him today. A court date awaits,” so begins a Rocky Mountain News article from May 7, 2003.

Things change, and yet they don’t. This time around, if Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature can actually compromise and pass a redistricting bill through both houses, the governor would probably sign it and that would probably be the end of it.

The odds of that happening are hard to calculate though. Some observers think redistricting will probably go back to the courts. Others think the legislature will get the job done, either now or in a special session.

On the one hand, you have Republicans in the House committed to a redistricting plan that would keep most district lines close to where they are now but would also tilt the deck ever so slightly to benefit Republicans and create several safer seats. Democrats on the other hand, say they are committed to competitive districts but at the price of moving lines more substantially.

“I would like to see the Legislature do it,” former legislator Ken Gordon told the Colorado Independent. Gordon is now a law professor.

“First of all, it’s their job. If they don’t do it, they look incompetent and political. On a good day, legislators have about a twenty percent approval rating. I’d like to see them rise above that and do their jobs.”

Gordon said he wants to see competitive districts, “where elections actually matter. Give people a reason to think their votes count.”

He said when you have non-competitive districts, then general elections no longer matter and only the primaries matter. “In primaries like that, it is people who push into the fringes who tend to win. Then you end up electing people who don’t just disagree with the other side, you elect people who think the other side is evil. When that happens it becomes hard to legislate.

“When you have competitive districts, then everyone is heard because elected representatives know they need to represent everyone in order to be re-elected.”

Finally, Gordon warned that legislators working on redistricting today need to listen to their constituents but should not give undue influence to elected members of congress or political parties.

“The people want competitive districts but political parties and sitting congress people have a conflict of interest. They want an advantage for themselves, but that is not what is in the interest of the people,” Gordon said.

From another May 7, 2003, Rocky article:

The debate was so rancorous that lawmakers met in face-to-face shouting matches, an upset staffer wept during a hearing and Democrats were barred from speaking.

The GOP is resolute in redrawing the district boundary maps in favor of Republicans – the first redrawing of congressional lines in mid-decade in 40 years.

The current congressional redistricting map was drawn by Denver District Court Judge John Coughlin last year after a Republican-controlled House and a Democrat-controlled Senate could not reach a compromise.

It’s possible that things have not gotten so out of hand yet this year, but the parallels are telling. There has already been plenty of name-calling, plenty of partisan accusations that each side cares more about creating advantage than about doing the right thing for the voters of Colorado.

The Legislature is charged with redistricting every ten years after the national census. Every decade, some states lose congressional seats and some states gain seats. Colorado gained a seat 10 years ago, but this time held steady at seven. On its face, then, redistricting this year is not quite as important politically as it was a decade ago. Still, some of the existing districts grew faster than others in the last 10 years and so adjustments to the lines need to be made to give each district roughly the same number of voters.

As always, both parties see the chance to gain an advantage. As always, both parties cloak their advantage seeking in the language of fairness, competitiveness and keeping communities of interest together.

“The problem is… you can very much effect future elections by how you draw the lines. If one party can control the process, they can really make a difference,” Colorado College political science professor Bob Loevy told the Colorado Independent.

He said both parties want to create one or two districts that the other party can win easily with something like 70-30 or 80-20 margins and then give themselves smaller majorities in the rest of the districts.

“You want your opponent’s districts to have 80 percent majorities, so Republicans want to cram as many Democrats as possible into one or two districts and then give themselves 55-45 or 60-40 margins in the rest of the districts. The Democrats want the opposite, naturally.

“It is very much a high-stakes game,” he said. “That’s why the gunfire.”

Loevy said he thought Judge Coughlin did a great job in creating the maps last time and thinks letting the judiciary create the maps is an ideal solution to the problem of partisan gerrymandering.

Ten years ago, when the Legislature couldn’t agree on a set of maps, both sides were told to submit their best, fairest map to the judge. According to Loevy, who sat in on the hearings then, the Democrats submitted the better, fairer maps and theirs were largely adopted by the judge.

“I thought the voters were well-served by Coughlin. He did as good a job as could be done. I think we should institutionalize that. Let each side submit their best map to the Chief Justice and let the courts decide.

“The fairness of that map was borne out by the 2010 election, where Republicans gained two seats in Colorado. That’s how swing districts are supposed to work. When the mood swings from one party to another, swing districts change hands,” Loevy said.

This year, he said, it looks like the Democrats are pushing for an advantage a little harder than the Republicans. “And that makes sense. Republicans now have four of seven seats, so they like the status quo. They are content to make adjustments on the edges, whereas it looks like the Democrats would like to gain a little edge in the 3rd district.”

He said he thinks that ultimately the Legislature will get the job done this year, avoiding another court case. He says there just isn’t that much to be worked out this time.

If legislators know their history, if they remember what happened last time, it might give them pause as they consider their options this time.

It wasn’t just that legislators failed to do their jobs after the last census. It was that after the courts stepped in, Republicans, once they got control of both houses, were unwilling to leave well enough alone and engineered what has come to be known as the Midnight Gerrymander.

It happened at the end of the 2003 session, in the middle of a night that some Democrats still remember as one of the worst of their lives.

“It was one of the worst days of my life,” recalls Matthew Moseley, who was an aide to Senate Democrats at the time. He is now putting the finishing touches on a book, “The Midnight Gerrymander”, due out soon. “It was one of the defining moments of my life,” he adds.

“It was pretty awful,” agreed Joan Fitz-Gerald who was a Democrat in the Legislature at the time. “I’ve never felt so vulnerable,” she said about the night that a Republican majority suspended the rules and pushed new maps through in the middle of the night.

She says Colorado was one of a handful of states that Republicans targeted nationally for the creation of GOP-friendly seats. “They thought if they could change just a few seats nationally they could create a permanent majority.”

She and Moseley both say Bush strategist Karl Rove was on the phone with Republican lawmakers through the night, though some of them deny it to this day.

From a Rocky Mountain News editorial of May 8, 2003:

The history of this sorry episode is the following: The 2001 General Assembly failed in its constitutional duty to redraw congressional districts after the 2000 Census gave Colorado a seventh seat. Legislators’ partisan inability to agree on a map meant that Denver District Court Judge John Coughlin picked one so last November’s election could proceed. The one he picked, though largely drawn by Democrats, was a pretty good one. It established three “safe” Republican districts, two in which Democrats are likely to prevail, and a couple that are competitive – based upon voter registrations. That’s about as much competition as can be expected in a state in which one party has a wide registration edge.

Those who see merit in competitive districts, as we do, should oppose any redrawing of the boundaries.

GOP lawmakers see matters differently, since redrawing boundaries could produce five safe Republican seats rather than three. Hence the drama at the Capitol (still under way as we wrote this): With this year’s General Assembly no longer paralyzed by split party control, Republicans decided to draw the congressional map after all.

From a Rocky Mountain News article published the same day:

“It was all a charade,” said (Joan) Fitz-Gerald, who complained on the final day that it was a plot engineered, in part, by the White House and Karl Rove, President Bush’s top behind-the-scenes man. “And we violated our own state constitution in the process.”

Not so, argued (state) Sen. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, whose map caused the furor. He said the legislature was only doing its duty – replacing a court-ordered map crafted when a Senate controlled by Democrats and a House controlled by Republicans couldn’t reach accord in the 2002 session.

“What we’re doing right now is buying us a big expensive lawsuit,” said Senate Assistant Minority Leader Ken Gordon, D-Denver, as the bill was debated on the floor.

He was right, of course. No sooner had Republicans pushed new maps through than Gov. Bill Owens signed the legislation to change the court-ordered maps to something more palatable to Republicans. This over the objections of state Attorney General Ken Salazar who let the governor and the Legislature know that he would not defend their actions in court.

Democrats immediately filed suit. Republicans authorized the state to hire private counsel to defend the Republican maps. The case went all the way to The United States Supreme Court, where hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees later, the original court drawn maps were upheld and the Republican gerrymander was tossed out.

From the Rocky Mountain News, May 10, 2003:

Ninety minutes after the governor signed into law a contentious new congressional redistricting plan Friday, Democrats retaliated by asking the courts to declare it unconstitutional.

In a lawsuit filed at 4:35 p.m. in Denver District Court, Democrats allege that the plan, which strengthens Republican voting margins in at least two of seven state districts, violates the Colorado Constitution, the Colorado Open Meetings Law, First Amendment guarantees and “numerous Colorado legislative rules and regulations.”

We know how poorly the gerrymander and subsequent court battle turned out for Republicans. Virtually every major newspaper in the state editorialized against the GOP power grab.

All of this was going on at a time when the state budget was in roughly the same shape it is in today–charged with making up huge shortfalls every year.

Here, the Rocky Mountain News of December 2, 2003 reports on the court case:

The Colorado Supreme Court handed Democrats a major political victory with potential national overtones Monday by striking down a Republican-drawn congressional map.

GOP lawmakers violated the state constitution in May when they replaced a map approved last year by the courts with one of their own, the state’s highest court ruled in a 5-2 decision.

“The state constitution limits redistricting to once per census, and nothing in state or federal law negates this limitation,” said Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey in writing the majority opinion.

“Having failed to redistrict when it should have, the General Assembly has lost its chance to redistrict until after the 2010 federal census.”

The Rocky reported that outside legal expenses to that point were about $600,000. Additionally, of course, were expenses incurred by the Attorney General’s office and numerous other state agencies.

But, they weren’t done. Driven by what they saw as the rightness of their cause, Colorado Republicans pressed on all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously for the original court drawn districts and against the Republican re-do.

That outcome was preordained by decades of legal precedent, going back to similar cases in the 1930s and on into the 1990s. For anyone to think this would be the case that got a different result is mind boggling, especially given the money invested.

As the Denver Post’s Bob Ewegen wrote in 2006, “They can’t be thinking.”

Well, according to Senate President at the time John Andrews, they were thinking plenty. In a column he published in the Rocky on June 9, 2003, he wrote this:

What kind of Congress do you want? That’s the question behind all the noise in recent weeks about boundary lines between Colorado’s seven congressional districts.

…

I want the kind of Congress that keeps our taxes down, respects our values as Westerners, and stands up for America against our enemies. I don’t want a Congress that agrees with the New York liberals on bigger government and with the Hollywood left on blaming America.

Most Coloradans feel the same. People in our state have generally liked Congress’ decision-making a lot better in the past eight years, with the heartland Republicans in charge, than they did in the previous 40 years with the tax-and-spend Democrats in charge. It’s been a welcome change.

…

There are only two kinds of Congress to choose from – one where Scott McInnis and other Republicans hold the majority, or one where Diana DeGette and other Democrats do. Nonpartisanship is not an option. And that’s why SB 352 is the right map for Colorado’s congressional delegation in this decade.

As is usually the case with redistricting, it was not then about fair lines or communities of interest. It was about engineering the lines to give one side an advantage, to allow one side to decide what kind of congress we’ll have.

While there are obvious lessons to be drawn from the last go-around, it is hard to tell at this point how things will shake out this year.

At the same time, former Congressman Bob Beauprez, who lost to Gov. Bill Ritter in the last gubernatorial election, came out publicly to ask Maes to step down. Beauprez has indicated he would consider stepping in to fill a vacancy if Maes withdrew, according to the Colorado Statesman.

Maes reportedly flew to Washington, D.C., late Tuesday night for meetings with officials from the Republican Governors Association.

If Maes withdraws this week, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office has said there may be time for the Republicans to name a replacement before ballots are printed. If Maes withdraws sometime after Friday, his name may be on the ballot even though he is no longer running for governor against Democratic nominee John Hickenlooper.

If that happens, Secretary of State director of communications Rich Coolidge said that any votes cast for Maes would go to whomever the Republican Party designated as his replacement.

When reached by phone this morning, Maes said, “Call Nate Strauch,” his communications director. He then disconnected the call. A call to Strauch was not returned immediately. Calls and emails to the Republican Governors Association also were not returned. There have been no announcements at www.danmaes.com.

The Denver Post is reporting former state Senate president John Andrews is also calling for Maes to get out of the race.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., in Denver Friday night. Photo by Joseph Boven/Colorado Independent

In a room of 600 conservative voters brought together by former Colorado Senate president John Andrews’ Centennial Institute, along with Liberty on the Rocks and Colorado Christian University, Bachmann brought the crowd to its feet more than once as she called for an end to the progressive agenda she said has taken over Washington.

“‘We are determined to live free or not at all. And we are resolved that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world,’” Bachmann read from founding father John Jay , ending her reading with the statement, “We will talk a little bit about what has transpired in the last 18 months and would we count what has transpired into turning our country into a nation of slaves.”

She reiterated her concern more forcefully toward the end of the program.

“I think this describes so well where we are right now,” Bachmann said before reading an excerpt from C.S. Lewis: “‘Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of it victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under a robber baron than under omnipotent moral busybodies… .’”

Bachmann urged the room to not only vote in constitutional conservatives like herself but also to make certain to implore their congressional delegation to vote them into leadership positions.

“I am not in leadership, but that is why I said in my remarks that it is extremely important that if the gavel turns, the leadership is made up of constitutional conservatives. All of you can put that pressure on them.”

Such a leadership, Bachmann said, would be able to implement a conservative shift in government that could, among many things, rein in federal spending. She pointed to numbers showing that when Obama took office the debt was $5.8 trillion, quickly rising to $13 trillion under his leadership.

According to the U.S Treasury Department on the day President Obama took office the total national debt stood at $10.62 trillion , and it has expanded to $13.2 trillion after massive spending on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to stave off another Great Depression.

Calling herself “giddy” with the notion of effecting change, she Bachmann laid out an agenda that has been the wish list for conservative politicians and pundits for years. She said first and foremost reforms to social security, Medicare, and welfare need to be addressed.

“We reform social security, then we reform Medicare, then we pare back welfare to the truly needy, for the truly disabled, because, yes, we can make that determination. No welfare for those who violate America’s borders. Close and secure American boarders, cut the budget, limit our foreign entanglements for America, then we massively cut spending first, then we cut taxes.”

Bachmann further said the military should not be used as a social experiment, called for the privatization of social security for those under 55, as well as the elimination of the capital gains tax, estate tax, alternative minimum tax, and the reduction of taxes to 20 percent for individual income and 9 percent for businesses. Finally, she called for the total repeal of “Obamacare” to thunderous applause.

Bachmann claimed the national health care reform package was implemented, in part, under the auspices of Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel, whom Bachmann, appropriating the claims of Betsy McCaughey, said supported the rationing of medical care to only those who were useful to the federal treasury. Bachmann, extending that claim to the administration, said , “It is about being useful not to you, not to others, but to the United States Treasury. How useful are you to the United States Treasury? These people are serious. It makes [Jack] Kevorkian look like Mary Poppins.”

While a number of sites have debunked claims against Emanuel, an ardent opponent of euthanasia, in a CBS interview he explained that he did not believe in rationing health care across the board but his contemplations as a philosopher found him looking at a situation where there might be one liver for three individuals. In those cases, he said he spoke of rationing, but that they did not apply to a larger system.

From the CBS interview:
Is he saying, as {Sarah] Palin and others have suggested, that those who aren’t “participating citizens” should have no guarantee to health care?

“No,” Emanuel says, “and I think I made it pretty clear I wasn’t endorsing that view, I was analyzing that perspective and what it might mean in practical terms. The rest of the text around that quote made it pretty clear I was trying to analyze it and understand it, not endorse it.”

The experiment drew its share of critics uncomfortable with what they saw as blurred editorial lines. The gang members weren’t staffers at the Post; they weren’t journalists; they were clearly partisans– which was the point. Yet, writing for the Post while conducting their fairly charged analyst-writer careers seemed to further muddy lines already grown faint in the contemporary mediasphere.

The answer on the part of the Post now seems to be to start fresh with Post staff writers, at least according to Kaminsky’s sign off blog, which appeared Tuesday.

We at the Gang of Four have been informed by our editor at the Denver Post that the Post is changing directions for their political blogs (basically aiming to have content generated by employees).

In any case, the move seems to reflect the growth of the media- and blogosphere, where online and offline media are increasingly seen as seemless and where evolving sets of “professional” norms and practices are emerging. At the risk of overstating, this move would appear to be more evidence of a discernible shift, part of a center shift and professionalization of online news media.

—
John Tomasic contributed to this post.

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The biggest thing going on with the Catholic Church right now is that bishops are resigning every passing day in Ireland in the wake of yet another outrageous Catholic child abuse scandal characterized by criminal failure on the part of Church leaders to self govern. To summarize events, a government-ordered investigation has found that thousands of kids across Dublin’s parishes have been molested and abused and that Church leaders– as unaccountable to the public there as they are here– orchestrated a craven decades-long cover-up, where the molesters were allowed to keep on preaching and molesting and, in one instance, holding regular attention-getting naked exercise sessions with children on parish grounds unrestrained and without fear of reprisal.

Do we need anyone, even talk-radio hosts, encouraging any more “self governance” on the part of the Church– even if under the so-far unblemished hand of Archbishop Chaput? On the contrary, “self-giving” Chaput might better earn his nomination as “Coloradan of the Year” by doing something leaderly like throwing open the books and letting Coloradans see for themselves how the Church here is spending its money. We might learn, for example, how much it has paid to defend priests against legal charges. Or whether the archdiocese is presently paying to house any accused or convicted priests. Or how much the Church in Colorado earns by doing business with price-gouging service-denying abortion-financing health insurance companies?

Andrews says he settled upon Chaput in consultation with four “ghostly jurors”: “Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Grant, spiritual fathers under whose wise and brave influence our state was born.”

Is it worth adding, given the absurdity of the premise, that the “spiritual fathers” would not likely have seen Chaput in the same light as does Andrews, and that neither would the “four centuries of Americans who pushed westward from the Old World’s exhaustion to the New World’s promise”? Is it worth adding that they might not at all “recognize in Chaput a friend to their souls,” as Andrews puts it in his over-the-top reverie.

Those who follow Chaput’s career at all know he is the first American Indian archbishop in the United States and is reportedly a descendant of the Potawatomi. In the era of the founding fathers, Chaput’s people backed the British and the tribe was subjected to reprisals and shunted over the course of the next hundred years into ever-shrinking less-fertile territories through one poison government treaty after another.

So the “ghostly jurors” Andrews leaned upon might likely see Chaput through the prism of their age as an odd convert to the white man’s ways or as merely an Indian– that is, as a superstitious pagan worthy of being only either shot or herded into a reservation, as were most of Chaput’s forebears.

Then again, Andrews could be right: Maybe General Grant, veteran of the Mexican-American war– if he were roused early enough in the morning, when he was coming down from one bout with the jug and not yet started on the next– maybe he would see Chaput as some version of “Coloradan of the Year” or at least “Potawatomi of the Year” or maybe even as a “friend to the soul” who could provide relief from the ravages of “Old World exhaustion.”

Yeah, sure, why not?

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Clinkenbeard was responding to comments made last week on former-state Senate President John Andrews’ KNUS Backbone Radio.

John Andrews

Talking about the initiative with Andrews, Colorado Right to Life board member Lolita Hanks played down the effects.* Stories of the legal troubles pregnant women might face were false, she said– just “scare tactics” used by opponents of the amendment.

Andrews promised to back the initiative by personally gathering signatures and he agreed that in the time before Roe when abortion was illegal, no mother was ever sued by a fetus.

Clinkbeard rejects the premise of the debate as misleading. It’s not fetuses of course who would bring the suits. The state, medical professionals, husbands, church groups– in short, there are many who would look, or who might even be obligated, to bring legal action on behalf of a fertilized egg or fetus. Clinkbeard said the issue should not be simplified. The initiative is about the 20,000 places in the Colorado Constitution where “person” would be redefined to include a human fertilized egg.

“Creating a new definition for the word person in the Constitution is scary because it could change everything from access to birth control services to the families decision to terminate a pregnancy even in cases of rape and incest, to property rights.”

Clinkbeard is concerned that proponents are looking to define the amendment as simply affecting the coverage of women’s access to birth control or stem cell research. It’s not an innocent interpretation, she said. “This is something that is completely untested in the United States legal system.”

This kind of pervasive legislation doesn’t exist anywhere in the States, she said. The personhood laws that exist are statutory and do not affect those constitutions.

“The proponents of this initiative don’t want voters to know how very dangerous it is. It didn’t exist pre-Roe and it is incredibly threatening to Colorado women and families.”

–
* Edit note: Lolita Hanks was identified as Vice President of Colorado Right to Life in the original version of this article. She is a board member and secretary of the board.

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“But what about all the hypotheticals where attorneys would be retained on behalf of an unborn child, perhaps to litigate against the mother of that child?” asked Andrews.

“Well I just think that’s just scare tactics,” Hanks said

Hanks elaborated by referencing the era before Roe v Wade made abortion legal. Hanks said she didn’t recall any pregnant women being sued by their fetuses back then. But personhood laws do not simply outlaw abortion; they also grant fertilized eggs and fetuses full citizens’ rights for the first time in history.

Anyway, continued Hanks, “mothers are prosecuted now. We have a schizophrenic society, where you can kill the baby all the way up to the due date, but if the mother is using meth, we are going to prosecute her when her baby tests positive for meth. Those kinds of things right now don’t even make any sense. So I guess using those scare tactics is just what they are.”

Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, has noted that women’s right would indeed be infringed should any personhood measure pass.

“We know, based on hundreds of cases across the country, some of them in Colorado, that if as a matter of law fetuses are described as separate persons, essentially pregnant women lose their Personhood,” Paltrow said.

Former Planned Parenthood attorney Kevin C. Paul of Heizer Paul LLP, told the Colorado Independent this fall that it comes down to a pretty simple legal formula.

“Constitutional jurisprudence is all about weighing interests. If you’re creating a new interest, one that hadn’t existed previously, then that interest is going to have to be weighed against [those of] anybody else. And if you take the position that an unborn fetus is to be legally treated just the same as a woman, then those two interests clash.”

Personhood laws already exist, for example, in South Carolina, where the tug of contested legal interests is a matter of record. A glaring example concerns Jessica Clyburn, a confused and psychologically disturbed woman eight months pregnant who jumped from a fifth-story window. Clyburn survived but suffered a stillbirth as a result of the fall. She was arrested on homicide charges and is still being held without bail.

According to the media, she had attempted unsuccessfully to commit suicide but according to the local district attorney’s office, she had committed murder.

Sponsored by pro-life activist organization Personhood USA as part of a national campaign, the personhood amendment would alter the state constitution in more than 20,000 places, granting even the cells of a fertilized egg full legal rights. Should it pass, Paltrow said the state will see a host of new criminal offenders like Clyburn and a growing docket of personhood crimes. Coloradans should brace themselves, she said, for “Carolinafication.”

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It won’t be easy, conceded Sharf in an Oct. 15 release. He isn’t kidding. Sharf is battling to represent the district once repped by current Bennet Senate primary challenger and former Colorado Speaker Andrew Romanoff. Sharf lost the district last year 24,114 votes to 50,806 votes. The district includes 45.1 percent registered Democratic voters and only 22.4 percent registered Republican Voters.

Court is for single-payer health care reform . Sharf is not. Court would like to see citizen petition rights protected while encouraging statutory rather than constitutional ballot proposals. Sharf is a champion of unfettered use of the ballot to alter the constitution.

The voter cheat sheet for the Sharf campaign in 2008 spells out his views.

He is mainly against affirmative action and unions.

On Backbone Radio, December of 2007, Sharf told audience members that affirmative action in all forms should be abolished at the universities. He said in terms of education “there are no evident facts that diversity in and of itself is a positive good.”

But the supreme court case he cited in his discussion specifically stated that “numerous expert studies and reports show that such diversity prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce, for society, and for the legal profession.”

The same year, in response to a co-host’s assertion that illegal aliens were destroying the delicate desert environment in California, Sharf quipped: “Who better to do the landscaping!”

His anti-union stance led him to support the so-called Clean Government Initiative, Amendment 54, which wreaked havoc with campaign finances earlier this year before being enjoined by a Denver judge as unconstitutional. His platform is here.

If Sharf does win this one, he’d put Rocky to shame.

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Nonetheless, returning from what feels like — even better! — a four-day weekend, these Colorado stories caught our attention:

• Former Colorado Senate president and Independence Institute founder John Andrews had a “somber Independence Day” this year because of the “grave danger Obama and his personality cult and his socialist agenda pose to this land we love,” according to an e-mail the Denver Post columnist sent to some Facebook friends and followers. “With this bad man in power,” Andrews continues, “Americans face a new and deadly challenge to our ideals. Let us rise to the occasion.”

“Where does this stop being flowery prose and become … incitement?” blogger JeffcoBlue asks at Colorado Pols, which posts the entire e-mail. Including this assessment of the president: “Our country has had the occasional president who did not believe in the truths of the Declaration or the restraints of the Constitution. But we have never had one who did not believe in the essential goodness of America itself. In Barack Obama, sadly, we now have a president who is an unbeliever of all three.”

Not to be outdone by himself, Andrews’ regular Sunday column in the Post takes a lengthy tour of “Colorado place names echoing with inspiration from something new and special for human freedom” — including some inspired by the James Michener bestseller Centennial — before concluding, rather abruptly: “Our past is present and our past is good. It elevates and nourishes us. Barack Obama talks about remaking America, transforming America, laying a new foundation. He’s welcome to try, but a lot of us will resist fiercely for the reasons indicated here.”

Not that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — the “Quitta from Wasilla” — escapes the wrath of Andrews this holiday weekend either. Palin’s “abrupt exit as Alaska governor fails the backbone test,” he writes in his Backbone America blog Monday. “Whether as a family move or a political gambit, it was poorly prepared and poorly presented. The seriousness, steadiness, toughness, and clarity we expect from national leaders were not evident.” Even though the former point guard formerly known as Barracuda “seems suddenly cavalier,” Andrews isn’t ready to write her off just yet. “2012 and 2016 are a long time away. Backbone Americans will watch with keen interest to see where Sarah goes from here.”

• And the already crowded race for the GOP nomination to take on U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet could be getting more crowded, Denver Post reporter Jessica Fender writes at Politics West. Citing the “dire” economic situation, 34-year-old Crested Butte attorney Luke Korkowski has launched a campaign site to help explore the possibility he might run next year. If he jumps in, he’ll join Aurora City Councilman Ryan Frazier, Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck and Denver businessman Cleve Tidwell on the hustings.

Former state Sen. Tom Wiens of Castle Rock is also considering a run, notes Face the State, which first reported Korkowski’s interest. Another potential candidate tabbed by the conservative news site, however, has changed his mind. “Mark Van Wyk dipped his toe into the Senate primary pool when he filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission to raise cash,” Fender reports. “But he said Monday he’s no longer running in 2010.”

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