Tuesday wasn’t just a very bad day for state Rep. JoAnn Windholz, it was a bad day for Aurora and all of Colorado.
This week, a group of voters from Adams County went to the state Capitol and delivered about 63,000 petitions demanding that the first-term GOP legislator resign.
Most of us live our entire lives without 63,000 people wanting us to do anything, but having that many people wanting to fire you makes a pretty powerful statement. Only about 18,000 people voted at all in the last House District 30 election. She won the race by little more than 100 votes in 2014.
But recently, thousands of angry people signed online petitions demanding Windholz resign because she said some really unintelligent and mean things just days after the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood massacre in November. I’m no fool thinking that each of these petition signers are home-grown voters, but there’s no doubt Jihadi JoAnn has evoked a tsunami of very local disgust for her kind of politics.
On a Facebook post, she said:
“Violence is never the answer but we must start pointing out who is the real culprit,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “The true instigator of this violence and all violence at any (Planned Parenthood) facility, is (Planned Parenthood) themselves. Violence begets violence. So (Planned Parenthood), YOU STOP THE VIOLENCE INSIDE YOUR WALLS.”
No doubt the families of the officer who was shot protecting the clinic and the family members of those killed by deranged shooter Robert Dear don’t see Planned Parenthood or anyone associated with it as the cause or agent of the ghastly murders. The rant comes from a woman whose district includes parts of Aurora, a city synonymous with tragic massacre because of the 2012 theater shooting. None of the 12 dead and 70 wounded there, nor the theater, nor the Batman movie team had anything to do with the ghoulish madness murder James Holmes unleashed. Nurses, doctors, administrators, police, patients and innocent bystanders didn’t bring on the murders nor deserve them. Windholz’ repugnant tirade is akin to those who believe rape victims have it coming.
She could have easily blurted out a fast apology or claimed temporary insanity or posting under the influence, but she didn’t. Even though her allies and critics alike gasped at the sheer insensitivity of her remarks, let alone the sadistic nonsense it stemmed from, she never apologized. The Denver Post in an editorial flinched at the callous rant. The Aurora Sentinel demanded she step down, pointing out that someone with such diminished judgment had no business helping make rules and laws.
Nothing. Her comments drew outrage from across the country, and a local band of voters started talking about a recall.
I really don’t understand why state Republican officials didn’t immediately step in and make it clear that as a political party, her reprehensible rant was over the top, no matter what her opinions on abortion rights are. Not over the top like, tsk tsk, but outlandish and unacceptable like, we’ve asked her to step down and will remove her from all House committees, because that’s not who Colorado Republicans are.
It would seem that state Republicans would want at least a shot at keeping this House seat after November, and lean on her to step down so they can find someone with at least a chance of getting elected.
Nope. At least, not yet.
Living on the outskirts of Commerce City in usually safe Democratic territory, Windholz was narrowly elected as a Republican in an upset election. There’s little doubt now that a Democrat will handily beat Windholz after all this. This is hardly her first extremist rodeo clown stunt since she’s gotten elected. She’s a co-sponsor of a bill seeking to bestow “personhood” on fetuses, a measure that Colorado voters have righteously turned down numerous times. Her politics smacks of a mindless religious zealotry that seems to be all the rage in Colorado Springs, but has absolutely no place here. GOP state Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt of Colorado Springs has built an entire career on lobbing zany and outlandish extremist Christian bombs at just about every target you can imagine.
It’s a bad day when, even in the face of this kind of protest, Windholz won’t back down and admit what a hurtful and erroneous mistake she made. It’s bad for her. It’s bad for Aurora. It’s bad for all of Colorado.
It’s really too late to recall Windholz, so she can either step down or feel the voters’ boot this fall. Knowing that, the group went to the state Capitol Tuesday to get others to do kind of the same thing.
“Our goal is to render (Windholz) unelectable,” said protest organizer Steve Cohn.
Windholz seems to have taken care of that all by herself.
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