I can’t let this go, and neither should you.
No doubt you’re as tired as the rest of us hearing about the butt slapping and other assorted flavors of sexual harassment served up to state legislators, lobbyists and staffers at the Colorado Legislature.
But some state lawmakers have now lost their minds over all this. Rather than cleaning up their noxious stunts that could easily get the crap beat up out of them by less-than-patient dads and husbands, a handful of Senate Republicans and others have become a pack of liars, cheaters and sleaze bags, just as foul as the guys that creep on women in the Capitol.
The toppers last week? State Senate Minority Leader Lucia Guzman stepped aside as that chamber’s top Dem, saying she couldn’t even look her Republican peers in the eyes anymore because their behavior in handling the Colorado Capitol #MeToo scandal has become so foul and so repulsive.
Here’s what regular folks — just trying to get by in Metro Aurora and across the state — need to know. If someone like Guzman makes a move like this over corruption among Republicans in handling the sexual harassment scandal they’re mired in, you need to pay attention. We all do.
It’s my full disclosure here that makes Guzman’s gesture so compelling. Guzman has been a close personal friend of mine for more than 20 years. Besides sharing a passionate affection for Colorado’s outdoors and the state’s excellent whiskey, we share a profound disdain for injustice.
Where I fight that fight from behind a keyboard, Guzman has forever been on the front lines, battling for what’s right, and combating what’s wrong. Even her most unyielding political foes can’t throw shade on her untarnished principles, her collegiality and her righteousness.
If this unyielding leader is sickened by what Republicans are trying to pull off in regards to this sexual harassment scandal, you should be, too.
The scandal envelops a handful of state lawmakers who have been outed the last few months for a variety of sexual harassment offenses.
The accused, so far, have been Rep. Steve Lebsock, a virtual stalker who was expelled from his House seat last month; state Rep. Paul Rosenberg, who had his wandering hands slapped for pestering a Capitol aid to get him a date with her brother; state Sen. Larry Crowder, unpunished for being handsy with a fellow lawmaker; state Sen. Jack Tate, unpunished for being the Capitol lewd dude and making creepy comments about what a young female intern wore and inviting her up to his office to talk about career moves; and in what has become the most notorious case, state Sen. Randy Baumgardner, who was relatively unpunished for slapping the bum of a Capitol staffer and related antics.
Given the body count across the country from celebrities large and small fell by the #MeToo tsunami, the run-of-the-mill crimes committed by these guys are what pretty much every woman, and many men, have encountered in the world of work.
That’s the whole point of #MeToo, exposing the ubiquity of and indifference to sexual harassment.
It’s well understood that these cases aren’t finally boiling over as some kind of revenge. In Colorado and across the country, they’ve become public so people can understand how dangerous they are, how damaging and how prolific.
In any setting, sexual harassment is humiliating, degrading and threatening. But in the setting of the Colorado Legislature, sexual harassment borders on being criminal, affecting the outcome of legislation through bullying, extortion and bribery.
But rather than these men stepping forward and apologizing for what’s far too common and apparent, they have bent the truth or outright lied in a vain attempt to proclaim innocence.
They’ve become sadistic in playing the classic game of turning the tables to paint themselves as the victim. Now they say these women are lying and seek to undo them because of partisan politics.
Pretty sick. What woman would ever subject herself to a level of ridicule, attack and potential disaster just to get creepy Jack Tate or Randy Baumgardner bumped off their committees?
And now it’s gotten even worse. After raising the stakes and making daily demands for an expulsion hearing for Baumgardner, Republicans conspired to go after Aurora Democratic Sen. Daniel Kagan, making him look like a dangerous women’s bathroom stalker because he mistakenly went into the wrong restroom once last year.
For the sake of distraction, Republican leaders are willing to sacrifice whatever dignity and virtue they had left to protect a few outed pervs.
Damn sick. The likes of state Sen. President Kevin Grantham and Sen. Majority Leader Chris Holbert are backed by a host of Twitter trolls and the kooks at Colorado’s extremist frat house, the Independence Institute.
Feigning to be Republicans, these guys are the state’s loopy libertarians who years ago realized the Libertarian Party was going nowhere in the state, so they kidnapped the Republican Party instead. It’s long been the breeding ground of people like John Andrews, Tom Tancredo and Jon Caldara.
This week, they worked to smear Baumgardner’s victims inside their propaganda organ, which masquerades as real news.
The No. 2 official in Denver’s House of Ayn Rand is Amy Oliver Cooke. She’s the wife of GOP Greeley state Sen. John Cooke.
In the house organ rant, she said investigations into allegations against Republicans were nothing more than Democratic witch hunts.
She pooh-poohed the seriousness of the offenses, doing what so many people do, passing it off as boys will be boys.
But she takes it further, by falling back to American life in the 1960s, where victims of sex crimes became the perpetrators. Cooke says women should learn to defend themselves against butt slappers and creepers at the state Capitol, rather than perps being forced to restrain themselves or get the boot.
Cooke wrote: “A good friend of mine told me once, “I’m a lady, not a prude.” For professional women, those are words to live by. Sanitizing all social interaction in the workplace will take a great deal of joy out of being a working woman. Or worse, women may find themselves unwelcomed in the work place all together.”
I know this lady would be unwelcome in my workplace. I refuse to tolerate sexual harassment and refuse to label others who feel the same way as prudes.
Cooke is reverting to the crafty old pre-MeToo argument that Baumgardner and Tate didn’t mean no harm. They were just funnin’ and these whiny Democratic women are taking this all too seriously, being “prudes.”
Like most men and women, I understand the very real difference between an off-color joke or some harmless and meaningless flirtation, and people who can’t keep their hands of other people’s junk or creep on them in elevators and state Capitol hallways.
You don’t have to a be libertarian think-tanker to understand what Cooke and her followers are saying: These victims had it coming because they weren’t well versed in her alternative to #MeToo, which she calls Not Me.
Cooke is saying it’s women’s responsibility to keep handsy dudes in line. But when they do, by filing complaints like this, she intimates they’re liars or just slutty partisan Dems trying to finagle a Senate majority.
I keep thinking it can’t get much sicker than this, and that was before last week.
Clearly it can and will. And all of this push back against women who just want to do their damned jobs without getting propositioned, creeped on felt up or blackmailed just emboldens other Capitol pervs out there who realize that thanks to Senate Republicans, it’s game on. Guzman was clearly the wrong Senate leader to step aside. But with people this morally corrupt, they’re not going anywhere on their own.
It’s up to voters to throw Republicans a lifeline to keep all of them from being dragged down into the muck just a few are now drowning in. So far.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on Facebook and Twitter or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com