To borrow from another meme and movement tripping up Colorado Republicans in the Legislature: Time’s up.
For weeks, state GOP elected lawmakers in the state House and Senate have been trying to fool everybody by saying they mean no harm or trouble to the Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission by holding its funding hostage.
At best, their story is a distortion. It’s more accurately an outright lie.
Here’s the truth:
A slew of state Republicans, but not all, have had it in for the state’s commission created to protect minorities ever since the panel ruled in 2012 that infamous Lakewood wedding cake baker Jack Phillips couldn’t legally pull the religion card when he told a gay couple he wouldn’t serve them because his religion compelled him to snub their request.
Both Phillips and legislative Republicans offered cliche responses, saying this had nothing to do with discounting the rights of homosexuals, but only the right of religious freedom.
That was the same distortion and lie that led to a lawsuit that has now wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Phillips was called on that lie by the state commission and forced to undergo education about civil rights and the law — if he wanted to stay in business.
Republicans who backed the right of business owners to refuse service to anyone whom they feel presses against religious beliefs clearly never got over it.
Earlier this year, they jumped at the chance to use the state’s Joint Budget Committee to feign an accounting ploy to withhold funding from the decades-old agency. State GOP leaders said they had no intention of doing harm to the entity, but they simply wanted to wait on funding until after a long-anticipated and standard sunset-review process took place later this year.
That’s the distortion. Clearly, Republicans are plotting to try and disarm the commission by blackmail, or defund it if they aren’t satisfied with changes.
It’s a foolhardy ploy. A likely U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of homosexuals could make the Colorado Civil Rights Commission perfunctory in the future. It would be hard to understand how previous case law couldn’t be applied to gays and lesbians against discrimination by businesses in the same way hotels, lunch counters and cake bakers can’t discriminate against blacks and use religious beliefs as a defense.
What Republicans are actually arguing for is a Colorado brand of Sharia law, permitting a state council of Republican guardians to impose their interpretation of Christianity on the entire state, and to the detriment of homosexual citizens, their families and friends.
Equality is not equivocal, and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission has long been the fair and respected arbiter of that dictum. Equal means equal even for gays, women and blacks.
The time is up for Colorado Senate Republicans to be equitable to victims of sexual harassment at the Capitol, referring to a national Time’s Up Now movement to force change, and the time is up for the same GOP leaders to be up-front about their true motivations to undermine or cripple the state civil rights agency.
The best choice would be to abandon their cruel and foolish push to sanction discrimination against the state’s homosexual residents. Those Republicans who can’t understand that must at least be honest so voters can remedy this problem at the November 2018 Election.