I took a week off from my columns (ed: you were gone?) and a whole lot of stuff happened in our court system, both national and state. A couple of Colorado Politics articles, including one of my favorites, Court Crawl, do their usual excellent job of explaining what happened.

By now, of course, everyone has heard about the United States Supreme Court’s decision to overrule 50 years of precedent in reversing Roe, and I could write quite a few pages on that outrage. Colorado will sadly play a vital role in the post-Roe era, as a state that continues to respect the terribly difficult but intensely personal decisions women must sometimes make. But you have already heard lots of commentary on that subject, so I won’t burden you with more.

Another SCOTUS decision is equally appalling, but entirely expected from this now entirely political third branch of government. As reported in the Gazette, the SCOTUS ruled that high school football coaches have a free speech right to organize Christian prayers, on the field, after games. This case pits free expression rights against the issue of an official pressuring kids to adopt a particular religion. As a former high school football referee, I’m appalled but again, not surprised.

As a guy who spent more than 25 years on active duty in the Air Force as a moderate Democrat and a non-Christian, I know what it feels like to be pressured to fold one’s own beliefs and to at least pretend to adopt the beliefs of the majority. I ache for the non-Christian kid who must decide whether to honor his own personal religious beliefs or to pretend to fit in by joining his teammates in a prayer that is not his own. The peer pressure will be terrible. I can’t help but wonder how many people celebrating this SCOTUS decision will be equally sanguine if a coach chooses to lead his team in “voluntary” prayer from an atheist, satanic, deist or other non-traditional religious faith.

But I’m not going to write about any of that (Ed: whew).

Instead, I want to draw your attention to both the Court Crawl column on CP and a separate CP story on the state Supreme Court’s ruling on three different ballot proposals. As you may know, the rules in Colorado state that any ballot proposal must be limited to a single change in the law. You can’t pack multiple legal changes into one initiative. The state court ruled that three different proposed ballot measures dealing with wine sales failed the single-issue test and therefore cannot appear on the November ballot.

These proposals caught my eye because of how different Colorado treats wine sales than did Michigan, where I grew up. As a kid in Ann Arbor, any visit to a grocery store would allow a shopper to pick up wine and beer from the alcohol aisle. I remember when I got to Colorado and looked for the wine section in my local grocery store, only to learn that such sales were illegal in the Centennial State.

The now-rejected proposals would have allowed for retailers other than liquor stores to sell wine, as well as home delivery of alcohol by third-party delivery services. Now I’m not much of a drinker, but like lots of people I have a bit of a libertarian streak, and so I tend to side with as few restrictions (other than age, of course) on such sales as possible. If I owned a liquor store, I’d likely have a different opinion, but as a relatively neutral party, I think you should be able to buy products widely, or to have them delivered to your home. There are two other measures that would expand wine sales and allow for some delivery that did make it to the ballot, and so we’ll see those in November.

I’m sure the rule that only one item can be in a ballot proposal has good intentions, but I confess that I’m not entirely sure that this is a good rule. And it appears that on some proposals it is not entirely clear from the text whether the proposal is, in fact, more than one core idea. Perhaps it is time to rethink that ballot proposal limit?

The Court Crawl column also informed us on the state’s highest court’s rulings in a number of other cases. Happily, the Court upheld the Colorado paid-family-leave program, which the voters approved by a wide margin. But my favorite ruling (on purely whimsical grounds) was the decision, by a 5-to-2 vote, that vehicle taillights must have red in them, but they don’t have to be entirely red. The dissenting justices wondered if rainbow-colored taillights would be OK, if they had some red in them, and I kind of want to see that. I think we all are pretty much aware that when the lights on the back of a car come on, we need to be ready to brake, even if there are other colors involved.

I am deeply distressed by the Roe decision, and the football prayer ruling is also a difficult pill to swallow. I am glad that our own state supreme court seems to be far less political than the national one. We can only hope that Colorado continues to be an oasis for common sense and freedom under the law, whether that be where you can buy wine or where a woman can exercise her right to personal choice.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.