Tag: Amendment 2

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.

Government watchdog group Colorado Ethics Watch has been engaged in a legal back and forth with Secretary of State Scott Gessler over a campaign finance rule adopted by Secretary of State last spring. In a brief filed with a Denver District court Wednesday, Ethics Watch argues Gessler is rewriting the law instead of merely setting forth rules directing citizens on how to abide it, and, in a counter claim, Gessler is asking the court to effectively throw out a constitutional provision he has sworn he would defend as an elected official.

Colorado Congressman Jared Polis and his partner, Marlon Reis, will be among those boycotting the Century Boulder Theater on Sunday. The movie house plans to show the film “Milk,” based on the story of Harvey Milk, member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and pioneer in the gay-rights movement who was gunned down in 1978. The theater company owner’s CEO, Alan Stock, donated $9,999 to California’s Yes On 8 campaign to prohibit gays from marrying.

Don’t ski here, don’t hike here, don’t convention here, don’t come here. That was the message, coming from the higher echelons of Hollywood, indeed from gays and lesbians and their friends across the country, in the weeks after Colorado became the “Hate State” and Colorado Springs the “Belly of the Beast” when Colorado voters approved Amendment 2 in 1992. Now post-Proposition 8, California and even Utah have found themselves the targets of even more sophisticated boycott efforts.

It’s Saturday night, and the dance floor of the upper room at Denver’s Mercury Café is packed with roughly 80 gyrating bodies. ...