WND writer Bob Unruh has a weird thing for turning news stories about his native Colorado into right-wing screeds. He did this again in a June 6 article:
For the third time in just a handful of years, Colorado is at the U.S. Supreme Court over its demands that it control the faith, beliefs and speech of people in its state.
Specifically, people who do business. First it was a cake baker, then a web designer and now it’s a counselor.
In the newest case, which is just developing at the high court, the state is demanding that Kaley Chiles, a licensed counselor, share only the state-approved faith messages regarding the LGBT agenda.
[…]It’s the state’s adopted beliefs in the LGTB ideologies that are at issue.
“The government has no business censoring private conversations between clients and counselors,” Jim Campbell, a lawyer for the ADF, said. “There is a growing consensus around the world that adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria need love and an opportunity to talk through their struggles and feelings. Colorado’s law harms these young people by depriving them of caring and compassionate conversations with a counselor who helps them pursue the goals they desire.”
Colorado officials have made it illegal to encourage, through counseling, that people, including young people, abandon the LGBT ideology and work to establish a comfort level being the sex they were born.
This, of course, is just another attempt by Unruh and WND to rebrand anti-LGBT conversion therapy as something benign. Given the typically coercive and denigrating nature of conversion therapy, it’s laughable for the ADF to claim it’s all about “love” and “caring.” Nevertheless, this promoted Unruh to go yet another anti-Colorado tirade:
Twice before it has intervened in Colorado’s attempts to dictate beliefs and ideologies.
It first tried to force a baker, Jack Phillips at Masterpiece Cakeshop, to express a pro-LGBT message that violated his religious faith. The high court ended up scolding the state for its “hostility” to Christianity, and the state ended up being sued by Phillips for its unconstitutional actions.
Colorado, led by homosexual Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat-majority legislature and an all-Democrat state Supreme Court, which is so leftist it blatantly tried to interfere with the 2024 presidential election by banning President Donald Trump from the ballot (it was overturned), tried the same scheme against a web designer, at 303 Creative, and took a major loss, again, from the Supreme Court.
It was the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, an often overturned panel, that affirmed the Colorado scheme to censor Christian perspectives.
Unruh doesn’t explain how right-wping hatred of LGBT people is a “Christian perspective.” Unruh rehashed another grievance in a June 19 article:
The Department of Justice recently told Colorado elections officials it wants to review all the data from the 2024 election. And whatever still remains available from 2020.
And state officials have claimed it’s a “fishing expedition” to try to help Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk who was convicted and sentenced to years in prison essentially for trying to salvage a copy of the 2020 vote data when faced with orders from a state officials to erase the details.
Peters was a conservative in the far-left state, where the all-Democrat state Supreme Court partisanly tried to remove Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot. Where virtually all of the top state leaders in the governor’s office and legislature are virulently anti-Trump.
Where leftists in population centers like Denver and Boulder openly advocate for Americans’ rights to be violated in order to protect illegal alien criminals. Where abortion was made a state constitutional “right” and the state constitution’s protection for voters against massive overtaxing plans routinely is undermined.
For example, Democrat lawmakers, faced with constitutional limits on raising “taxes,” routinely hike them anyway and then simply call them “fees.” For example, state residents who license vehicles and pay taxes have to pay a “fee” for roads and bridges. Visitors to the state using the same roads and bridges don’t pay that “fee.”
Roads and taxes have absolutely nothing to do with the purported election issues Unruh is supposed to be writing about, but that’s not going to stop him from ranting about it. And Unruh is lying about Peters. She was not imprisoned “essentially for trying to salvage a copy of the 2020 vote data when faced with orders from a state officials to erase the details”; she was imprisoned because she allowed a security card accessing her county’s election system to be misused by a fellow election denier, and was then deceptive about who that person was. Prosecutors and the judge pointed out that Peters was trying to make herself famous by promoting fraud claims, even though no vote discrepancies were found in Mesa County.
The rest of Unruh’s article is a attack on Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold, copy-and-pasted from a right-wing website, for objecting to the Trump administration’s fishing expedition into the state’s election data.