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Here's a great story. A handful of obscure persecuted people persevere to triumph over the cultural elite, the media elite and the political elite.
That's the gist of a book that just emerged: Gay Politics vs. Colorado and America: The Inside Story of Amendment Two. It was written by Stephen Bransford, the media advisor to Colorado for Family Values.
His book has a great plot, full of twists and turns and suspense as the heroic crusaders, beset on every side by their sly enemies, fight elite cabals and finally triumph at the Colorado polls in 1992, only to be thwarted by a pernicious judicial system.
Unfortunately, Gay Politics is presented as sober history, rather than as an entertaining novel, and when you compare its heroes and villains to the Colorado we live in, some disparities appear.
For instance, Bransford portrays the Amendment Two promoters as just plain folks who got upset and bravely took on the system. Just plain folks like Bill McCartney, the CU football coach, and Bill Armstrong, a millionaire and a former two-term U.S. senator from Colorado.
They're wealthy and prominent, but of course they're not
members of any unsavory elite. Bill McCartney, in fact, was
relentlessly persecuted
-- which must explain why he
makes more than the university president and has his own TV
show.
It's the other side, the bad guys against Amendment Two, that form the evil elites -- the cultural elite, the political elite, the media elite.
We also discover that Colorado is a generally liberal
state.
We have a Republican legislature, a rabidly
pro-business governor, capital punishment, strict tax
limits, ever more prisons under construction, a history of
going Republican in 9 of the past 11 presidential elections
-- what's it take to be a conservative state? An
ayatollah?
But to be fair, the conventions of narrative require heroes and villains, and the more powerful you make the bad guys, then the greater the triumph for the good guys.
More disturbing is the revelation that Colorado for Family Values is guilty of the same deceptions that it charges the opposition with.
In the CFV world, there's a hidden gay agenda to totally transform American society, and gay-rights ordinances masquerading as mere fairness are just the tip of the iceberg. Bransford documents this, so maybe he's right.
But his account makes it clear that CFV had an agenda
that wasn't on the ballot, either -- to make America into a
Christian fundamentalist nation. To keep this from the
public, the CFV insiders labored successfully to insure
that no special rights
was the focal point and to
make folksy and likable Will Perkins the main
spokesman.
Never was it mentioned before the election that this CFV
insider, the campaign's media advisor, believes the
following: Separation of church and state has been
pounded into the public consciousness. Most now accept this
idea as part of the Constitution, though it is not.
That's news to me, and it makes me worry about what sort of campaign CFV will come up with next.
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