Tag: Amendment 48

Ultra-conservative Christian talk radio hosts are taking a new approach to getting their message out — ambushing right-wing pundit Ann Coulter over her support for 2008 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who absolutist antiabortion activists accuse of being "willing to sacrifice children for your vote." The Denver-based American Right to Life Action is leading the charge with a YouTube video excerpting Coulter's on-air radio freak outs and calling on the acid-tongued author to apologize and retract her support for Romney.

This year is the 55th birthday of the birth control pill. It is also 44 years since the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized birth control in Griswold v. Connecticut. Yet, debates over family planning and contraception are alive and widespread. Coloradans witnessed this first hand last fall when the "personhood" amendment that could have re-criminalized birth control in the state was defeated. Similar measures have already been introduced in seven other states so far this year.

Efforts to block a contraception bill shriveled today in the Colorado House after a series of weird and contentious legislative hearings and an unsuccessful attempt during a House floor debate Friday to add a poison pill amendment to insert the religious definition of pregnancy as at the moment of conception.

Colorado House Republicans failed in their attempt Friday to modify the Birth Control Protection Act that would re-define pregnancy as at the moment of conception. During the floor debate, bill co-sponsor Rep. Anne McGihon (D-Denver) derided the wrecking amendment offered by Rep. Don Marostica (R-Loveland) as a back door tactic to grant "personhood" to fertilized eggs.

Semantics were the order of the day when conservative Republican state senators attempted to weaken a bill defining contraception arguing that the state must first define that "life begins at conception."

A controversial political tactic to ban some reproductive health services moved a step closer Tuesday. A bill to confer constitutional rights on fertilized human eggs passed the North Dakota state House Tuesday and moves on to the Senate.

A 23-year-old Lakewood man who plans to meet with legislative staff Tuesday to review his proposed ballot measure to allow gay marriage in Colorado says he was inspired by 20-year-old Kristi Burton, who sponsored the controversial "personhood amendment" on last year's ballot, Lynn Bartels reports in the Rocky Mountain News. "I don't think there should be gender-specific laws when it comes to marriage in Colorado -- or anywhere," golf club salesman Stu Allen told Bartels.

Kristi Burton, the tireless force behind Colorado's Amendment 48, was the toast of the nation's antiabortion elite at the American Life League annual conference Friday. So much so that they even swiped the ballot measure's "personhood" moniker as the confab's title.

Denver's March for Life rally at the state Capitol Thursday was as much a witness to an awkward family reunion of marriages of political convenience as a gathering to protest the 36th anniversary of the landmark Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. Correction: State Rep. Amy Stephens was misidentified in the original publication of this story as having attended the rally. She did not. The Colorado Independent deeply regrets the error.

Despite a crushing 3-to-1 loss of a pioneering, but controversial, state constitutional amendment to confer civil rights on fertilized human eggs, an American Life League spokesperson made a curious slip of the tongue in a weird silver lining statement about its future plans to ban abortion.