CO Springs displays Gay Pride flag prominently over the main entrance of City Hall as a civic memorial ensued, although usual Front Range Wednesday winds shredded the original, although the city has ordered a replacement and better fastner construction. 'Winds of Change'.
In 2005 when we moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, we were greatly concerned about how the political and social atmosphere would affect our adolescent children. My wife’s family had been associated with Colorado Springs dating back to the mid-30s when her grandparents purchased a mountain cabin on Pikes Peak mountainside roughly fifteen miles up the Ute Pass, west of Colorado Springs. The family's original cabin then served as a summer refuge from Kansas polio outbreaks. Her grandfather, a doctor in Wichita, Kansas, feared for his young family’s exposure. The cabin eventually turned into a modern vacation home and served us as a base camp when moving here. It provides a summer retreat for my wife’s parents each year and a periodic weekend or holiday gathering place for the families. It was always our family’s “safe space”.
Seventeen years ago our two high schoolers, our daughter, then a strident modern feminist, and environmental activist, while our son was just entering high school, already beginning to come out sexuality as we privately recognized he was gay. Our previous hometown, Racine, Wisconsin offered him a “safe space” as our Unitarian Universalist Church had an open and unapologetic gay and social-political activist, Rev Tony Larsen. He was locally known for holding spiritual candle-lighted crime scene vigils seeking to heal the harm in the Racine community following a violent murder. Tony was also an original openly gay minister even in the Unitarian Universalist faith world.
My son now recalls how I once openly confronted a Racine County legislative candidate who held that gay marriage was a threat to her marriage---all marriages. I strongly and emphatically inquired how the private relationships and bedrooms of others were a threat to my marriage to my wife. Her reply was if I didn’t see it she couldn’t explain where I replied oh your just a religious homophobe who needs counseling. She lost. But later Robin Vos won that seat and now Wisconsin is straddled with his Trumpist legislature leadership. Unfortunately, I once knew him when he was on the County Board.
In 2005, the atmosphere in Colorado Springs was the opposite being openly hostile to LGBTQ communities, whereas the far more liberal Denver and Boulder communities were forcing the issue of acceptance. Behind the scenes back before 2005, the BIG FOUR that included current Governor Polis, multi-millionaire gay activists of Tim Gill, Jared Polis, Pat Stryker, and Rutt Bridges began their efforts to infuse the Democratic Party into a pragmatic, centrist, socially conscious movement. Then Colorado Springs Pridefest was just fifteen years and a defiant rejection of Colorado Springs base culture. In 2011 the then Mayor Bach refused to provide a proclamation honoring the celebration. while Denver had been hosting a super-charged radical-alternative lifestyle, celebration since 1976. The local Unitarian-Universalist Church near the edge of the downtown was ground zero for fighting back against this radical conservativism since 1992 pointing at Colorado’s Amendment 2. and its open GLBTQ discrimination.
In the early 1990s, Colorado became known as the “Hate State.” In November 1992, with a 53% majority, Colorado voters approved Amendment 2. This measure, written by religious fundamentalists in Colorado Springs, sought to amend the Colorado State Constitution by making it illegal to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. Citizens Project, a grassroots organization promoting the values of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance was founded in Colorado Springs that same year – and still exists. On May 20, 1996, the United States Supreme Court struck down Amendment 2.
Its primary driver of such open discrimination was the Colorado Springs-based [Christo-Fascist] front organization known as Focus on the Family.
Graffiti on the Focus on the Family sign after the attack
In 2005, Focus and Rev Dobson was still a local media political, and social force holding hostage much of Colorado Springs's narratives. Colorado Springs and its greater El Paso County was considered one of the top ten most Republican-conservative (red) voting districts in the nation. and I was a former Green Party and Democratic party activist. It seemed both scary and daunting, not just politically but how our adolescent children would find a safe space to grow into young adults.
Fast-forward to this past week, now seventeen years after we moved to Colorado Springs, our family has grown up and my wife and I are entering retirement age. Last Sunday morning I awoke to find that Colorado Springs was again the most recent edition of an American senseless mass shooting massacre. The national news obsession lasted only lasted a few days when another senseless massacre took place in Virginia, (again). Unconnected to Colorado except that it's Virginia, where my youngest first cousin was shot and killed along with her boyfriend in 1996. They were students at another Virginia college, (James Madison University). the connection is guns, guns, and guns in the hands, of angry white males, where something is socially wrong in our society where shooting people because of hate is toooooo common.
Last Sunday, I watched the replay of the 3 AM press conference feeling the gravity of the community assault at Q Club as they reported five dead, and seventeen wounded. Treated in three hospitals the news reported our community trauma. Great, we had a citizen hero, who halted the massacre, a military veteran turned microbrewer and a bar owner who was straight and was there with his family merely to enjoy the show.
In the subsequent 8 AM presser, I watched as Colorado Springs political and civic authority leaders universally come to the podium and authentically display how deeply troubled and incensed they were that Club Q, a former safe space for the Colorado Springs LGBTQ community was now pierced and assaulted. They were going to be aggressive to protect the entire community including our LGBTQ community. This sentiment was no accident and permeated through the police leadership and local DA. Most telling was Mayor Suthers, a former DA, US Attorney, and Attorney General, a dyed-in-the-wool Colorado Republican who discussed that the massacre would be aggressively investigated as a “hate crime”. In an interview with NPR, (NPR no less!) Suther agreed that the 2022 republican national rhetoric and discourse of vilifying LGBTQ communities as dangerous “groomers” embracing Christo-Fascism for political gain or actual belief. NPR
MARTIN: [...] this past election year did see some campaigns that featured and kind of leaned into anti-gay or anti-trans rhetoric.
SUTHERS: Yeah.
MARTIN: And I do wonder if you think that that is a factor here.
SUTHERS: It certainly could.
MARTIN: As briefly as you can.
SUTHERS: We have no ability to say it is at this point in time in this. But you saw what happened in Orlando. It's obviously a matter of tremendous concern. I agree with President Biden's comments about the sort of potential bias crime. And we will do everything we can to determine exactly what the motive was here.
MARTIN: And before we let you go - I have only about 10 seconds left - can you just tell me about how the community is dealing with this today? This is a terrible incident.
SUTHERS: There's community functions already - vigils. I've been to one already. I think there's a couple this evening, and I'm sure there will be several in the days coming. There will be overwhelming public support, including financially, to help these victims.
I was astonished. This is not how I expected our political and civic leaders to so publicly display the attitude rejecting open Christo-Nationalism that was now merged with Trump's racist-based MAGA-Fascism, blaming it as the fuel for this local mass murder. Colorado Springs always had a significant political fringe where elements had infiltrated local government bodies like school boards, municipalities, the police force, and state legislature politicians. Hell, El Paso County’s Sheriff, coincidentally not present in any of these pressers, never enforced Colorado’s Red Flag law. The local county Republican Party organization is led by such MAGA zealot personalities, while the latent political power of Focus and the Evangelical Right still is Congressman Lamborn's base constituency. This sentiment can be summed up by the former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis captured on her own podcast show.
She condemns the victims for “presuming” that because they are either LGBTQ or merely patrons of a bar like this they are not Christians and will be in hell. Such a judge as I suspect in this realm so she shall be judges well. But what in effect she is also doing is dehumanizing and justifying that the victims were less valued because they do not meet her own warped religious viewpoint. Colorado Springs is home to Michelle Malkin the ascorbic and reactionary Fox contributor. She was a guest speaker and an alt-right rally in Denver where there was a shooting. The Denver Post op-ed headlined that Conservatives needed to disown her.
This Thanksgiving holiday our family gathered at the family’s vacation home, which was once our base camp. Living here, we participated in transitioning Colorado Springs to bringing our city to a pale shade of purple. Back in 2005, there was but one, lone, local elected Democrat, Michael Merrifield, a retired public school music teacher to the State Assembly. He represented the political gift-gerrymandered district, although still a competitive district located in the central and western parts of Colorado Springs. Skip now to 2022, Colorado Springs Democratic candidates won three of six city majority redrawn State Assembly Districts, maintained control of one of three State Senate seats primarily in the city limits, and there are two bona fide Democratic City Council members along with three others who are independent centrists. Yes, definitely a pale shade of purple like the transition of colors on the Gay Pride flag that flew over Colorado Springs City Hall.
At our holiday dinner table, a deep discussion of Club Q rose. Our daughter who once visited the club was shaken. Our son, now an openly gay adult, who is in a long-term relationship with his boyfriend, both successful, 30-ish educated professionals living in a Denver suburb, talked about the risks of going to LGBTQ clubs and social gatherings. He said that after the Orlando Pulse club massacre he thought about the fact that going to those places is a risk. Then he said he would not let terrorism rule his life and was much like me, unafraid of ass wholes and blowhards. In management within the national security field, he did say that the Trump world had unleashed a true domestic terrorist threat in this country. The threat comes from both asymmetric, individual terrorist self-appointed volunteers consumed by hate psychology like the one at the Q Club. But more daunting are the organized militias like the ones that converged on January 6th. Their threats are not just pointed at the LGBTQ or other minority communities, their threat is on to all of us.
Our conversation moved to a deeper, more subtle subject of pronoun usage as a self-identifier among the LGBTQ community. I had never grasped that concept very well even though I’m a recently ‘mostly’ retired high school math teacher who was a bubbling, yet sensitive, straight father who was an openly LGBTQ advocate. For years I strongly challenged the cultural smear slang that invaded our youth’s culture; “that’s so gay”. Once in a parent-teacher conference, a parent confronted me on my correction of their child. I was unapologetic informing the parent that my classroom is a place for mathematics instructions, not cultural insults. When they said their religion does not accept gays and would take it up with the principal, I said you are welcome. I was asked not to be so confrontational by the administration which was made up of private LGBTQ members, I replied how do we react if they said “that is so Black or cracker or Mexican”? Slurs and smears are not acceptable in my classroom.
My son’s boyfriend explained the concepts of pronoun usage in the LGBTQ world quite well. In short, society has to get out of the traditional binary all-inclusive masculine/feminine labeling as an identifier. The real point is society must move beyond me, an aging, liberal, former backend hippie, and boomer, so that civil society can socially grow beyond us, fully accepting and embracing LGBTQ persons as truly equal. They said that even living in the liberal Denver metro, they still must seek out safe spaces so they can even non-sexually touch each other, or more importantly, touch their straight and gay friends. Within the male LGBTQ community, public touching between males is still forbidden outside of safe spaces. That is why so many interviews of the survivors of the Club Q massacre expressed the safe space nature of the place. They could be themselves in a public place and not feel intimidated by the rest of society’s bigotry or ignorance.
I replied that I have seen you two hold hands in public. One example was this summer at a state park. They laughed and said that is because you were around, being that unafraid older white-haired boomer protector. You know that republican-looking, heterosexual parent, who would rapidly turn into a grizzly bear from a big Teddy. Your presence gave us a bit of safe space. Laughter around the table.
The conversation turned to how since the massacre. Surprisingly how empathetic and inclusionary Colorado Springs leadership has been to the LGBTQ community. It was not this way in Colorado Springs after the Planned Parenthood massacre in 2016. Back then, the reaction was more about how Planned Parenthood was a magnet being a danger to our community, posing an ongoing threat to our law enforcement personnel as one was shot and killed responding to the mass shooting. This is even though two civilians were also killed and nine others wounded. This time across the city, major corporate, educational and social institutions were flying their oversized flags at half-mast. Not mandated by any political leadership, the symbolism was unmistakable. Practically spontaneous, and self-appointed the display was noticeable. Last night we passed an Evangelical mega-church marque sign which said: We back the Club Q community”.
Colorado Springs is fast becoming the most populous municipality in Colorado, as El Paso County most likely now exceeds 750,000. Growing at a rate of 1.5% annually, Colorado Springs comprises 85% of our county’s population. The future for this once quant, former Western mining town, then a cow town, military town, and rather recently the bible megachurch center is becoming a young, modern city. The inclusion of diverse communities must be made safe, where we all can live together in peace. With it, comes the new money and inherent urban problems of any major metropolitan community as the town continues to attract young, tech-savvy professionals who are now filling those rapidly rising, trendy, downtown high-end, high-rise apartments proliferating our once sleepy central part of the city. Along with this comes attracting all sorts of diverse, multi-cultural lifestyles.
Sitting in our mountain vacation home, once located up a series of gravel single-lane switchbacks along the border of a National Forest, our retreat was now also on the edge of Colorado Springs's ex-urban suburban sprawl. Permanent residents are now the primary households who commute down to Colorado Springs or telecommute, not out-of-state seasonal residents. Times and things have changed greatly over the last seventeen years we have lived here. It began well before we moved here, starting with overturning Amendment 2 in the Supreme Court in 1996. But it was not until 2008 that the Obama campaign began running the table and laid the groundwork for Colorado’s Democrats. That's when Colorado started becoming a bluer shade of purple. In 2018, it was fully blue, electing all the state executives, both state legislative chambers possessed Democratic majorities and 4 of 7 Congresspersons. Colorado currently has both Democratic US Senators and the Congressional delegation is now 5-3, Democratic. ([Karen] Boebert only has a 500+ vote margin as a hand recount is being conducted. She is our only national blemish. As more young voters come online their ratio in voting is more than 70/30 Democratic, outright rejecting the current Republican worldview.
What I conclude is that the Republican traditional moderate stalwarts, especially in Colorado Springs are looking to find a way to pivot away from their party’s radical Christo-Nationalism and MAGA-Fascism factions before they all fall into marginalized oblivion. Who remembers the Know-Nothings? Who can recall the America First movement? They are all compost buried under in this Great American Experiment where each time the rise of pragmatic citizens using democracy to turnover as under this radicalization back into the political undersoil.
CO Sos Griswald-D and former SoS Williams-R public service ad about CO Voter protection
Even my once adversary, the former Colorado Secretary of State, Wayne Williams, who now is running for mayor of Colorado Springs, (the current mayor, John Suthers, is term-limited), pivoted away from the MAGA -Fascists, when this summer he participated with the current Secretary of State Jena Griswald-D, regarding voter protection in Colorado as not to be afraid to vote in public service ad. This invoked a MAGA reaction where some sought to recall him from his city council seat. That effort faded into oblivion. They couldn’t get close to mustering 24,000 certified signatures to get on the ballot. It was not officially reported how many they did receive but the inside whispers among those in our local political community were they failed to get more than 1000 signatures.
So even the once top ten Republican voting county in the national mere two decades ago is now transitioning to accept, even embrace our LGBTQ communities. My MAGA-Fascist neighbor who moved here from Florida seven years ago has been defiant through it all. Once friendly he now scoffs at neighborly waves. His wife mentioned to my wife that her husband is so upset that Colorado Springs has turned “lib”.
They came here wanting to live among conservatives and found something else. Now he is talking about moving back to the panhandle of Florida and risking the hurricanes that took their previous home.
The New York Times today published an op-ed by its Opinion Board titled, I suggest you read it in its entirety: How a Faction of the Republican Party Enables Political Violence. They start out:
The Metropolitan Republican Club is an emblem of the Republican establishment. It was founded in 1902 by supporters of Theodore Roosevelt, and it’s where New York City Republicans [...] Many moderate Republicans have quit the clubs in disgust. Looking back, Mr. Schiffbauer said, Oct. 12, 2018, was a “proto” Jan. 6.
In conflicts like this one — not all of them played out so publicly — there is a fight underway for the soul of the Republican Party. On one side are Mr. Trump and his followers, including extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. On the other side stand those in the party who remain committed to the principle that politics, even the most contentious politics, must operate within the constraints of peaceful democracy. It is vital that this pro-democracy faction win out over the extremists and push the fringes back to the fringes.
And there it is. The once deep-red Colorado Springs, once the epicenter of anti-LGBTQ is now a new sprouting kernel of moderate Republicanism. Seeking to migrate back towards a pro-democracy principle. It is not the rhetoric that is so illustrating, this so to speak, but the unstated actions by Colorado Springs local political civic leaders both political and social, who are forging this effort; Mayor Suthers front and center displayed previous unstated empathy and inclusion in his many pressers this week when he quietly called for the hoisting of a giant Gay Pride Flag over City Hall. As seen in the picture above the symbolism was unmistakable. Taken along with the former Secretary of State, Wayne Williams making a public service announcement with the current Secretary of State, nonpartisan protection of Colorado voters' rights demonstrated a political pivot. If anything good can come about from this horrific massacre at our Q-Club it might be that Colorado Springs grows to accept and embrace our LGBTQ communities while leading the Republican Party to this safe place.
I personally know a few moderate Republicans who have embraced our current reelected Governor Polis. Himself an open and unabashedly gay, Jewish father, who wears unapologetically radical, colorful, sneakers instead of wingtip derbies in a suit he embodies the acceptance of our LGBTQ brothers, sisters, and children. It is not that he is gay or Jewish, that is simply unspoken as unimportant, it is because he has been the best Colorado governor in generations leading Colorado through these tough times to continued prosperity.
Pragmatism and success “trump” the hate-bred ideology of the white grievance culture that is fuel for this era’s violent politics. NY Times again:
[...]It has happened before. The Republican Party successfully drove the paranoid extremists of the John Birch Society out of public life in the 1960s. Party leaders could do so again for the current crop of conspiracy peddlers. Voters may do it for them, as they did in so many races in this year’s midterm elections. But this internal Republican Party struggle is important for reasons far greater than the tally in a win/loss column. A healthy democracy requires both political parties to be fully committed to the rule of law and not to entertain or even tacitly encourage violence or violent speech. A large faction of one party in our country fails that test, and that has consequences for all of us.
As a deeply devoted and longtime serving Democratic Party official that an honest and forthright Republican Party that holds to the absolute principles of democracy and the rule of law is essential for our society to continue to progress and prosper forging peace, within our shores. NY Times:
Extremist violence is the country’s top domestic terrorist threat, according to a three-year investigation by the Democratic staff members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which reported its findings last week. “Over the past two decades, acts of domestic terrorism have dramatically increased,” the committee said in its report. “National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland. This increase in domestic terror attacks has been predominantly perpetrated by white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.” While there have been recent episodes of violent left-wing extremism, for the past few years, political violence has come primarily from the right. The onus falls on Republicans. While voters this month rejected some of the most extreme candidates, the party is still very much under the spell of Mr. Trump and his brand of authoritarianism. [...]Political disagreement need not include the menace of violence. Americans, and their political leaders, have the ability to choose a different future.
We as a nation need a new pledge of allegiance, not to the flag, or some warped idea of religious righteousness that does not give faithfulness to our Constitution. The new pledge must give an oath to the Constitution and the principles of the rule of law.
I give no quarter or safe harbor to radical right-wing zealots, (or left-wing counterparts as well). Those fascists seek to reorder society in their image of rule, by some flawed and criminal person engaged to only seek power for sake of power and steal riches. Not the welfare of a nation. My neighbor earns no empathetic reciprocity if he continues to seek this radical change of Trump fascism, nor does anyone else until they relent and submit to this new pledge of being faithfully loyal to our Constitution and the concept of reciprocal equality of all American citizens. Where violence, especially violence because of ideological and political differences is not tolerated in the least, where we find the initiators and perpetrators, making them all accountable to the fullest extent of the law. In Colorado Springs and the state of Colorado, that means this political violence and hateful rhetoric is being put under, buried under the soil of our political compost. Let’s see this sentiment infect other bastions of former moderate Republican red communities like Colorado Springs.
The sunset of Colorado Springs LGBTQ hate
