The governing class in Colorado these days thinks you’re too stupid to make basic decisions about your life, your community, and your future. If there’s a theme of this year’s legislative session, it’s that lawmakers have a vision for how life should be lived in Colorado, and they are willing to use state law to make it so.

Let’s look at two examples plucked out of this fast-moving river stocked with many anti-freedom measures.

First, the “pro-choice” community with a straight face has authored one of the most blatant anti-choice, anti-competition bills to come along in many sessions – ending any pretense that these advocates are anything but pro-abortion.

As part of their annual abortion-rights package of legislation, liberals have targeted pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) that are an alternative to traditional abortion clinics. These centers are an irritant to the abortion movement because they offer medical screenings and other services including ultrasounds so that mom can see her baby and hear the heartbeat. These centers aren’t shy about their mission to support a healthy mom, a healthy pregnancy, and a healthy live baby.

Yet lawmakers have invented a specious charge that these centers, which Planned Parenthood falsely refers to as “fake clinics,” are engaging in “deceptive advertising” somehow suggesting that they publicly offer abortion to do a bait and switch. Even though there have been no credible charges in the state of a pregnancy resource center doing such a thing.

Pregnancy Resource Centers have become a deep competitive concern for the abortion industry (since they outnumber abortion clinics 51 to 20) or it would not be necessary to try to demonize and marginalize them – and limit the choices of pregnant mothers- through the power of the legislature.

Henry Ford famously said buyers were free to choose any color for their new Model T “so long as it’s black.” This same attitude is clearly the aim of abortion advocates in limiting “choice” to only one path.

The second anti-choice bill is the effort to have state government remove the choices many municipalities make in shaping local land-use decisions in local communities, particularly around housing.

Zoning is how local communities shape the character and quality of life, in a way of their choosing with lots of input from residents and businesses. Yet the Capitol elite believe many municipalities have not made “proper” choices to provide housing that is more affordable and more dense, including expanded multifamily options, “walkable” communities, and housing near mass transit centers. (We want you out of those cars, people!).

The details of this bill are very complex, but the motivation is simple. The Capitol majority wants to substitute this view for the choices of locally elected officials – and the voices of local citizens.

Criticizing what is clearly a major overreach by state government, the Colorado Municipal League and others have numerous objections to this proposal, including the potential local impacts on roads, increasingly scarce water resources, potential overcrowding in public schools – even the ability to preserve open space.

How narrow-minded. It’s just so sad that these local yokels won’t kowtow to wiser leaders in state government – even though they may have never visited a city whose zoning decisions they want to override.

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers said it best when he told Denver media: ” All of a sudden the state legislature in their wisdom is saying, ‘You’re not doing a good enough job, you don’t know what you’re doing, we do, we’re going to tell you what to do. .. But apparently, we’re too stupid to understand the need for affordable housing and only the state understands what we need to do.”

These are just two recent examples. But the enemies of freedom are legion.

They want to make choices for you on how you protect yourself, how you live out your faith, what you should drive, how you cook your food and heat your home and even in which industry you should build a career.

When viewed one-by-one, these bills can be seen as isolated irritants. But when you view the panoply of what is being done to Coloradans, drip by drip, your basic ability to order your life and choose your best future is being diminished, day by day. And it’s not going to change anytime soon.

Sean Duffy, a former deputy chief of staff to Gov. Bill Owens, is a communications and media relations strategist and ghostwriter based in the Denver area.