PERRYBLOG: It was his fellow GOP, not gays seeking wedding cake, that robbed Klingenschmitt of religious freedom

You may not like the brutally weird and insensitive things oddball Colorado Springs state Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt inflicts on all of us, but you’ve got to love the irony this politician has brought down on himself.

The first-term Republican has made himself a recent Household name for his extremist anti-gay and anti-abortion-rights rhetoric. Sometimes as a member of the state House of Representatives, but mostly as his YouTube alter-ego, Dr. Chapps. Chapps is a fiery clerical persona that spews punctiliously scriptural nonsense for his for-profit ministry, “Pray In Jesus’ Name.” Last week, he told his faithful that the pregnant Longmont woman who was viciously attacked by a woman who cut her unborn child from her body was a curse sent from God because of bad human behavior.

The comments created a firestorm at the Capitol, where Republicans said Klingenschmitt was embarrassing the Republican Party and Democrats said he was embarrassing the human race.

So Klingenschmitt’s own House leadership removed him from one of his two committee seats as punishment.

The irony? Msr. Klingenschmitt was the state rep who sponsored a bill earlier allowing the deeply religious to discriminate against gays, if the Good Book tells them so. While the bill failed, plenty of Republicans rallied for the measure, saying it kept the government from infringing on First Amendment rights.

Well, well, well. Looks like it was the GOP, not some gay couple looking for a wedding cake that was behind forcing Klingenschmitt to apologize and essentially abandon his deeply held religious views, however kooky and offensive the rest of his fellow Republicans and others found them.

Cries of foul by some fellow Republicans are pretty well founded, I’d say. Klingenschmitt made his comments outside of the Capitol, actually, and not in an official capacity as a state representative, but as the whacky Dr. Chapps. KlingenChapps is pretty much the same now as he was when his Colorado Springs constituents elected him first in a GOP primary last year and then as the Republican candidate.

Of course this is all politics. And he serves on committees at the pleasure of the democratically created House rules, which say that if you piss off leadership, they can jack with your committee assignments. Klingenschmitt can consider himself jacked.

In the mean time, he’s learned a little contrition. He said he’s muting Dr. Chapps until the end of the session, and he’s faithfully voting his party’s ticket until the end of the session.

It’s political theater. The real show will take place at home in Colorado Springs, where his own constituents can either “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” him into better behavior, and probably elect him to a second term next time around. Apparently in a state House district like his, with great responsibility comes great freedom.

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