There's something to be said for having your personal prejudices annihilated.
Before moving to the Centennial state from Utah one year ago, I fully believed that Colorado was a bastion for everything liberal. And, it has to be said that all of my initial assumptions were proven true.
Health insurance was easy to find with a plethora of options presented. Because I had no job or really any money, social programs to get me on my feet were at every turn. Plus, if I wanted cannabis, I just had to make a quick five-minute drive to my dispensary—a far cry from having to travel to a completely different county like I had to do in Utah. Where, even though it’s legal for medicinal use, it’s priced in such a way as to make the illegal option the only realistic choice from a financial aspect.
Yet, as I began my writing career with The Rooster and took to investigating the numbers and other realities of how things are truly run in Colorado, I began to see the same pattern happening over and over again: there are just as many pro-conservative laws/ideological foundations in this state as there are liberals ones.
For example, though Colorado has one of the least restrictive abortion laws in the country, women in rural and mountain towns often lack reproductive health care access. The latest hospital to follow this disturbing trend can be found in Durango, where Mercy Hospital has decided to stop offering birth control via tubal ligation.
Doctors who deliver babies at Mercy said they were told that beginning April 15, they can no longer provide post-cesarean-section tubal ligations. The hospital already prohibited tubal ligations after vaginal births but had been allowing them after C-sections because it had been considered an undue burden to make patients schedule a separate surgery at another hospital, doctors said.
In other words, convenience for the hospital is far more important than women's rights. And whether you want any more children or not, the hospital has now made that decision for you.
What makes this situation even worse is that there was no public announcement made. Instead, a stupidly vague statement was added to the Centura Health hospital’s website last September noting that Mercy is “responsible for conducting itself in a manner consistent with the ethical principles of the Catholic church ministry.” The hospital had recently completed a “reeducation” of hospital staff and board members regarding the church’s ethical and religious directives, it said, adding that “patients are fully informed of all treatment options.”
Of course, for any business to feel emboldened enough to make such massive changes to their health and well-being policies, you need an enabler at the highest state levels supporting these decisions.
Enter Dave Williams.
In early March, The Colorado Republican Party selected former State Representative Dave Williams as its new chairman. And though Williams supports restricting reproductive rights for women—like the aforementioned "religious freedom" argument used by Mercy Hospital—that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Williams has also previously tried (unsuccessfully) to insert the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” into his name on the party’s primary ballot last year and insists that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. And like ex-President Trump, he's totally at ease with using violence as a tool to get the party's way.
In his speech to nearly 400 hardcore Republican activists and party leaders during his chairman acceptance, he made it clear he views his standing as being akin to a "wartime" leader. Williams also made it clear that he believes the party’s recent poor performance in Colorado is simply due to it not fighting hard enough, and not because of any disconnect between its activists and the majority of the state’s voters. “Our party doesn’t have a brand problem,” Williams told the group. “Our party has a problem with feckless leaders … we need a wartime leader.”
That takes care of the conservative-tinged businesses and politicians. Now, what about the citizens? It seems that they too have a desire to see certain Republican-based principles become enacted en masse.
In the 2022 midterm election, voters approved a ballot measure to cut the income tax rate permanently—reducing it from 4.55% to 4.4%. According to a report by the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, this would cause a reduction of state revenues by over $400 million per year. The report also found that almost half of the tax savings go to those who make more than $1 million per year; which is less than 1% of tax filers. And about 75% of tax filers get less than $63 per year in tax savings.
The fact that these cuts were passed by a 2-to-1 margin shows there to be at least one thing both parties agree with: the lure of putting ANY money in your pocket is too strong of a pull—even when the scales are tilted to the point of complete bullshit.
Yet, this isn't the only passion they share.
At their core, there's one other thing I believe the members of both parties share in terms of what motivates their viewpoints into action and is something that can’t be found in numbers. That as long as the activity they are doing is lawful, the government should stay out of their lives. In Colorado, this feeling is so pervasive to all that live within its borders that it verges on the point of libertarianism.
Whether the person is a member of the trans community who is seeking medical treatment to complete their transition, or an avid gun collector wanting to purchase another semi-automatic rifle, they don't want some faceless entity running their life and telling them what they can or can't do; especially if it's perfectly legal. Keeping this in mind, it’s important to remember that when you are able to convince someone there are certain exceptions to this rule–like if breaking it is due to some “noble cause” such as saving an unborn child under dubious pretenses–the wires get crossed and you see events like those at Mercy Hospital take place.
When scrutinizing everything written here today, there's one major component that becomes crystal clear when it comes to understanding this new purple status of ours. Though both parties seem to want the same endgame, it appears the GOP has completely fucking lost the script of what "not interfering in someone's life" looks like. Not in any actionable way at least.
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